


graceless hearts

by darthdarcyy



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alpha Kylo Ren, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ben Solo is a hacker, Ben has already done any redeeming himself bro is ADJUSTED, Depression, Don't Judge Me, Dorks in Love, Established Poe Dameron/Finn, F/M, I renamed it, Luke is the hermit CEO of a tech company, Mental Health Issues, Music, No Pregnancy, Office, Omega Rey (Star Wars), Political stuff, Rey works in a call center, Slowest Burn, Snoke is his dead ex boss, Soft!Boi Ben Solo, TW: SUICIDAL IDEATION IN ONLY A FEW CHAPTERS, after ch 11 that tw ends, graceless hearts fits way better than certain things happen in the dark, in fact not a ton of smut sorry peeps, sorry friends!, tw: suicidal ideation in some chapters, welcome to the wangst bus, yes - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:54:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 43,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22238947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthdarcyy/pseuds/darthdarcyy
Summary: Rey Niima, independent Omega and millennial college graduate trying not to starve during a recession, takes a desperate job at a tech support call center. One slow Saturday evening, she watches as a tall, beautiful Alpha moves into the luxury loft apartment building next door. To the apartment directly across from her window.The rest, as they say, is history.you smell like every good memory i've ever had.(previously certain things happen in the dark)
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 210
Kudos: 784





	1. i have heard about the civilized,

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!!! Here is my contribution to the Omegaverse nonsense. It's not going to be AS smutty as it should be, but it'll still be some interesting trash lol. If you haven't heard of Omegaverse, GOOGLE DAT STUFF. AND TY FOR READING I <3 YOU
> 
> The chapter titles come from Louise Gluck's poem "Primitive."

It was 4:00pm, an hour into Rey’s shift. The winter world outside was just hesitating between daylight and evening, the sky a dappled grayish pink. It was a Saturday, no one had called in twenty five minutes, and Rey was achingly, painfully bored. So bored, she was sitting with her chin on her upraised fist, tempted to take a nap until the bleat of the phone woke her.

When she took the job on a recommendation from her friend’s mate/boyfriend/whatever, she’d expected boredom. In fact, Poe had warned her about it. “Make sure you bring something to do,” he’d told her. “People either have too many dumbass questions at night or none at all.” He’d started on night shift himself before quickly ascending the ladder to upper management within a few years. Rey had no such goals, she just wanted a paycheck and the one other benefit this job provided: insurance at fairly low premiums.

Night shift at a call center had no promise of adventure or excitement, but weekends gave the term an entirely new meaning.

The online chat system was shut down for the weekend. There were no emails to address, no tickets to rectify. There was only so much she could do online with the security restrictions, so much music she could listen to, so much of her tech support script she could memorize, before she felt like pulling her hair out and screaming. 

Rey couldn’t stand boredom or idle hands, never could. She didn’t know if it was the stress of being an Omega in a world that wanted to dominate her, or the near-constant anxiety of her childhood, but her body always thrummed with a tension she couldn’t quite explain, as if it were poised for something, like a rabbit in an open field, just waiting for the scream of a hawk.

(Aren’t Omegas prey, after all?)

Her entire life had been spent tinkering with something or another, fidgeting her way through school and college, her free time spent waist deep in wires and old bits of scrap. When she was a child, she’d thrived on doing anything to keep her brain switched off as she bounced from home to home. ( _I’ve moved sixteen miles from my last house. They won’t be able to find me here. They won’t know-)_. Activity was essential in foster care. It was easy to distract yourself when your hands were busy. 

The thoughts liked to creep in during the quiet, peaceful moments.

Sighing, Rey swiveled her mouse to startle her sleeping computer back to life and turned her bleary gaze to the world outside. Luckily, she was assigned to a desk near a tall window, where she had an exciting (not) view of the luxury loft apartment building directly across the courtyard. She’d framed the sill with little pots of succulents and one stubborn fern that refused to die no matter how many times she forgot to water it, just to make the view slightly more palatable, but it was still deathly boring. Like everything else about this job, she was beginning to realize.

The adjacent building was massive, at least six stories higher than her building, all crisp concrete and glittering chrome finish. Rey, who lived in a tiny walkup studio thirty minutes south of here by bus, rolled her eyes whenever she passed through the courtyard. Who would choose to pay upwards of 3k for a cement box? She’d checked the website once out of curiosity and snorted with laughter: the only amenities had been a clubhouse and areas to toss pet waste.

Cement boxes were exactly what every apartment seemed to be, at least from her vantage point. Boxes with pretty stainless steel appliances, high vaulted ceilings, and cold hardwood floors that probably cost an arm and a leg to heat in the Pacific Northwest winters. It wasn’t a dry cold here like it had been in Arizona, where she’d grown up. The near-constant moisture and lack of sunlight needled itself into your bones like a cat seeking comfort. Rey spent most of her paycheck not eaten up by rent and student loans on her electric bill, just to keep her thermostat above 60 most days. Probably cost quadruple what she paid to heat a loft.

Ridiculous.

In the three months since she’d started at the company, Rey had never seen a light on in the place directly parallel to her seat. It stood empty, brightly lit by the eastern sun in the afternoon, a shadow-filled cave once night fell. The windows above and below were framed with fairy lights, pink and yellow neon signs, the warm glow of lamps and television sets. Every night, she could see glimpses of couples, individuals, groups of friends sitting on their couches, cooking in their tiny kitchens, leaning out of open windows with joints clutched between their fingers, blowing clouds of smoke out into the misty rain. And even once, awkwardly, having sex on the floor next to the front door in full view. 

Really, people had no shame whatsoever, something Rey appreciated when she could watch reruns of _Frasier_ over their shoulders at 10pm, but not so much when they didn’t pull the blinds down before engaging in...well, private activities.

Holding back a shudder at the memory, she watched a crow hop lightly across the roof of the building, a chip bag clutched in its beak, its head bent against the chilly wind and beyond, the darkening sky. It was only five or so seconds, and a grin played about her mouth at the sight, but when she looked back at the vacant apartment, it wasn’t full of shadows anymore, barely lit in the setting sun.

A light was on.

Rey sat up straight in her seat, nearly jerking her headset off. How had she missed that? Had it just happened?

The apartment was still void of human habitation, but a single cardboard box sat in the entryway and the front door was open, granting a view of the hallway beyond and several other boxes, varying in size and shape.

 _Ooh_ , she thought, as her screensaver began to come to life behind her, this time unnoticed. _Interesting._

Before Rey could properly give into her compulsion to invest herself in someone else’s business (she’d spent hours staring into the shadows of that stupid apartment, after all. She had the right to be nosy. Right? Maybe?), the phone rang, an incessant and startling jingle, making her jump and whirl in her chair.

Of course, her computer was locked by now. She had to bash the keyboard to wake it up again and quickly enter her password before the call dropped, which would surely be a black mark on her record after forty five minutes of no calls. 

Ultimately, she wished she’d let the call go to voicemail, because really...who was _actually_ eager to talk to elderly men who clicked on phishing ads? 

**

One forty five minute cantankerous support call faded into a fifteen minute billing call from an irate secretary at a law firm, which drifted into a quandary concerning antivirus software and a twenty minute rant where Rey could barely hear anything outside of a baby crying, andbefore she knew it, three hours had passed. Painfully passed, but passed nonetheless, giving her zero opportunity to see what was going on across the way.

Her remaining coworkers left at 6:30 as she was asking a customer if she had _possibly_ tried turning her laptop off and then on again, Tally and Nina waving at her from three rows over as they shouldered their bags and booked it for the door. 

And finally, she was alone with nothing but the buzz of the overhead lights and her spotify playlists for company.

Well, and the idiots who just kept calling. 

_I brought this upon myself_ , she thought, as the phone shrieked in her ear mere seconds after her last call. _Feeling bored and all. They can smell it, like horses can smell fear._

_Not that I’d know anything about horses..._

“Thanks for calling Resistance Technologies, this is Rey. What can I assist you with today?”

“Hi. My internet isn’t connected. I need you to reboot it.”

Rey sighed, thoroughly cursing herself. 

This was going to be a long night.

**

By the time things slowed down, Rey had nearly forgotten about the light in the apartment across the way. 

After she finished one last email with a sarcastic flourish, she slipped her headset off and switched her phone status to _removed from queue_. By the grace of the employment gods, it was finally her lunch.

Slumping against her desk, Rey rested her forehead on her folded arms and allowed herself one long, drawn out, dramatic groan that echoed through the empty office. Without looking up, she scrabbled for her phone, which was stuffed under her monitor riser under a pile of various papers, and struggled up again to tap a message across its cracked screen.

**Finn, remind me again why I did this to myself.**

As she was pulling her $.29 cent chicken ramen out of her messenger bag, her phone pinged.

**The night shift incentive and the insurance? I’m sorry Peanut. Do I need to come over and tell some assholes off?**

Rey scooped her phone and her measly lunch up and headed to the office’s common kitchen. Holding the edge of the cardboard ramen container between her teeth, she grinned as she typed her response.

**Touche. And I wish. Could you maybe make sure no more middle aged men call asking why their keyboards aren’t in alphabetical order? That would be great.**

Her flats echoed lightly off the cement walkway as she weaved between desks toward the break room and the waiting kettle. Resistance Technologies was an old business, old enough and lucrative enough to afford an office in the pretentious Pearl District. The ceilings were warehouse-high and showcased exposed wires and beams, and the floors were uncovered concrete. A coworker had once said that the designers were going for a _minimalist take on a tech space_ , but it was just cold, drafty, and ridiculous to Rey. How much could they save on heating if they just carpeted the damn place? Probably her own yearly salary’s worth or more.

By the time she’d reached the kitchen and started the kettle, Finn had finally responded. Rey knew he was close to his heat, which was making contacting him difficult. Since he and Poe had made things official on the mating front, Finn stopped taking his suppressants and his cycle was much more constant than it used to be.

Rey, who was at the point of wondering if she was asexual, twenty three year old disinterested virgin that she was, didn’t quite understand the appeal of it all. In fact, she rolled her eyes whenever the couple gushed over the mating bond, or offered a tad too much information about what was occuring in their bedroom, but she was happy for Finn. Outside of herself, he was one of the few people she truly loved in the world. Even if he had, as she constantly teased him, sold out. 

**Dear god, is nothing sacred?**

Rey snorted as the kettle ceased boiling with a hiss and click, sliding her phone into the back pocket of her jeans so she could fill her ramen cup and not spill it on the way back to her desk. She refused to take her breaks in the cavernous lunch space, half lit and bordering on creepy when the office wasn’t full of chattering phone associates and headquarters’ management.

As she slid into her seat, setting the cup of noodles next to her mousepad and pulling her phone out again, resigned to another...23 minutes of nothing, as Youtube was blocked on her computer and the cement walls made reception too terrible for anything but texting, she remembered the light and the apartment and the mysterious box. Desperate for _some_ entertainment, Rey turned her chair completely toward the window and scooted right up to the sill.

The apartment was bathed in a warm golden glow from a combination of a black chrome lamp, unpacked and balancing precariously on a pile of boxes, and the overhead living room light. The single box had been joined by several others, stacked haphazardly throughout the space. A beast of a brown leather couch took up most of the main living area now, accompanied by a white braided rug and a clear glass coffee table. Wood stools edged in black chrome lined the breakfast counter that bordered the tiny kitchenette, and...Rey’s eyes widened...a man sat on the edge of the middle stool, his bare feet wrapped around the rungs. 

She could tell even from this distance that he was a tall man, his broad back hunched nearly in half over the counter, clearly eating his dinner just as she was about to eat hers. How he’d moved all of those boxes, the massive, sturdy looking furniture, into the apartment without her noticing, probably accompanied by friends or movers, amazed her. 

Rey forgot about her ramen cup, about responding to Finn, as she sat there staring. She had a full view of the entire apartment, from the spacious living room to the bathroom with its separate tub and walk in shower, to the metal stairs leading to the lofted bedroom. Three boxes were stacked in the bathroom and several others were grouped around the staircase. If she squinted a bit, she could see the edge of a bed at the top of the stairs, walled in by yet more boxes. 

There was a full twelve or thirteen feet of space between her building and his, and Rey could see he had a full head of wavy, glossy black hair and muscles that strained the sleeves of his gray t-shirt. The bare feet balanced on the stool rungs were massive, and she found herself gulping, the usually cool office air suddenly stifling.

 _Oh god_ , she thought, as the man suddenly leaned back, stretching impossibly long arms over his head and leaning so far to the side that his t-shirt crept up, revealing a few inches of his pale, muscular back. Face flushing, Rey finally looked away, slapping a hand over face.

Was she seriously _this_ invested in that stupid apartment? Because its new inhabitant happened to have a heavily muscled back with those dimples you only saw in action movies -- 

She kicked off from the floor, rolling away from the window and back to her desk. Fingers trembling just a bit with absolutely ludicrous, impossible nerves (when you actually see his face he could be a troll, for god’s sake, Rey, you actual idiot. Or worse...an _Alpha_ ), she snatched up her phone and texted Finn back, breathing slowly and carefully through her nose. 

**Clearly not, but I digress. How’s things?**

_This is absolutely absurd._

_This is now a hostile work environment._

_I can’t function under these conditions._

_You did this yourself, you dolt! Stop stalking people and you won’t have this problem!_

“Ugh,” Rey said aloud as she pulled her now cooling ramen over and opened her desk drawer, grappling for one of the many take out sporks she kept handy. 

“I’m finally losing it. Bloody night shift.”

**author's note:** i commissioned this piece from [ThisisLexie](https://thisisartbylexie.tumblr.com/) for this chapter. Gorgeous, right?


	2. the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. but you and i are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is another short one, sorry about that! i don't have a beta either, so it might be a bit clunky, but i wanted to explore more of rey's relationship with her designation. 
> 
> if you want to follow me on tumblr, i'm darthdarcyy. i'll have a post with chapters linked, as well as the story's pinterest board and spotify playlist there because I AM THAT NERD.
> 
> thank you all so so much for your support and kind comments!!! you are very appreciated! <3

Rey refused to look out the window for the rest of her shift, going so far as to lower the blinds with her eyes half closed. Instead, she focused on answering every single call on the first ring, making sure to smile (“It’s a pain in the ass, but they can hear it,” Holdo had said during their training) and keep her voice as level as humanly possible. Like the narrator from her meditation app, the one she listened to on her bus rides home:  _ we’re going to take a longggg deeeeep breathhhh, at the count of three… _

“Yes, please fully shut down your device before starting the reboot process. Of course, I’ll wait.”

When the lulls got to be too much and the calls completely tapered off into a silence thicker than cotton around 10, Rey read ebooks on her phone, played solitaire on her computer because  _ why not _ , and tried...tried...not to look through the mostly opaque blinds to the building beyond. The nervous fidgeting was dreadful, her nails were bitten to the quick and she’d twisted her hair until it hurt, but she tried.

All this, Rey thought, looking down at her ragged nails, her stomach in knots, and she hadn’t even seen his face. 

Surely, with this response, he couldn’t be a Beta who just happened to like working out. He had to be an Alpha. Some Alphas, the truly potent ones (or the most  _ compatible _ with your DNA) could have a pull from miles away. It was why Rey worked the night shift as the only Omega on Resistance Technologies’ phone crew: to completely avoid Alphas. It had been a liability to hire her for midnight hours, she’d been informed so by managers Holdo and Akbar during her interview process, in case of breakthrough heats while she worked alone in an unsupervised building. But they’d taken a chance on her, nonetheless.

(In Rey’s opinion, her resume had been looked at for the years of customer service experience and Poe's reference, but they’d hired her for the shift for the British accent, which had stubbornly stuck by her through fifteen years in the States. It got American managers every time.)

And of course, despite all of her efforts to avoid them, an Alpha would pop out of the woodwork at the worst possible time, like a damn spider in a shower. A  _ potent _ one, to boot.

It was something about being an Omega, the morbid cat-killing curiosity, the fascination that sometimes bordered on, in Rey’s opinion, stalking. Finn had told her many times, as well as the various Omega-focused social workers and state-appointed psychiatrists of her childhood, that designated humans were ruled by their pheromones, their lizard brains. They thrived on personal interaction, dreaded loneliness. Only the rarest Omega or Alpha could live without human contact, and they usually had lost their mate.

Alphas had an easier time with independence, due to their natural inclination toward aggression and competition. If they gathered in groups, infighting was common. But Omegas, on the other hand, were supposed to be soft and gentle, their main evolutionary purpose to be surrounded by babies, cherished and warm. As her last social worker had bluntly put it, “ _ Omegas aren’t meant to be alone, Rey.” _

But Rey had always felt at odds with the natural compulsions of Omegahood, preferring her studio apartment, her quiet, lonely world, her independence, to nearly everything else. Even if it meant the most human contact she had was with her morning barista, she didn’t mind.

Over the years, she had grown used to anxiety and loneliness being constant, lurking companions. She swallowed down the need to  _ know _ people, the need to be validated, approved, stroked like an eager kitten, as if they were pills rather than feelings in need of exploration. 

There was a freedom in denying the baser urges of her designation. A rebellion that screamed  _ I am more than mere sweet obedience. I will not submit. _

Because wasn't battling the constant cravings better than being bossed around by some asshole suped up on testosterone? Wasn’t it better than peeling back the ugly, awkward, fleshy parts of herself for another person only to be cast aside in the end? Conversations, shallow nights out at local bars, even pretty muscles and soft smiles and touches weren’t worth it. 

So she watched people from afar, people like sarcastic Tally and bubbly, sweet Rose at work, the little elderly couple who frequented her favorite tea shop, tiny children and their mothers at the park across the street from her apartment, and now...this man. Whoever he was.

Rey was staring off into space, wondering if she could just up her suppressant dose until she was a zombie (ha, perhaps the calls would be less painful then) and how exactly she could convince her doctor to go along, when the alarm she’d programmed on her computer to signal the end of a shift began to chime.

“Thank you god and satan and everyone in between,” she muttered, quickly logging out of her phone and clocking out. She gathered up her trash in one hand, half eaten ramen and a crumpled packet of lifesavers, slung her messenger bag over her other shoulder, and scuttled to the trash cans in the break room, and the exit beyond. 

She didn’t look back at the window. Not once.

**

The heavy glass doors closed behind her, enveloping Rey in frigid January air that nipped at her cheeks and bare fingers. She took a moment, a brief pause before the long walk to the bus stop and the even longer ride home, to look up at the slate gray night sky, to let that cold air cool her flushed cheeks and neck.

And then...as she took a great gulp of midnight and the promise of snow...she caught a scent.

Like most aspects of her designation, she found the heightened sense of smell both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for scenting nearby Alphas she'd rather avoid, a curse while riding public transit...grocery shopping...walking through any city...

Okay, it was mostly a curse. And it had Rey freezing on the flagstones.

It was drizzling tonight. Usually smells tended to dissipate quickly in the rain, but this scent hit like a steaming hot freight train straight to the face. It was all forest and musk, tangled with spicy sandlewood and the impossible, mouthwatering scents of a wonderful Sunday morning breakfast: black coffee, hot buttered toast, sweet maple syrup drizzled on fluffy pancakes. And the most odd: cotton fresh from the dryer. It was the most fantastic, strange, indulgent thing Rey had ever smelled. So good, it made her heart start to pound in her throat and at her pulse points, made her thighs quiver. 

It smelled like home. 

And as a woman who had never had a home, Rey felt one thing: complete terror.

“No no no no,” she whisper-chanted with her heart clenched tight in her throat. Keeping her back to the glass walls of her building like a prey animal, she slowly made her way across the cobblestones and onto the sidewalk. She couldn’t let the loft building out of her sight, as if it were about to come to life like some ancient beast and gobble her whole. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the side entrance doors was propped open with a box, and beyond, a U-Haul was parked along the sidewalk, its flashers on and blinking like twin stars on the pitch black street. 

And of course, because she had the luck of a pile of bird dung, a familiar figure, tall and towering, stood on the lowered ramp of the vehicle. His heavily muscled arms were wrapped around a stack of three more boxes ( _ jesus, this guy had a lot of crap _ ) and he was so huge his view was completely unobstructed, the top of the first box just touching his chin. 

He had a cell phone balanced between his ear and shoulder and Rey could hear him speaking into it as he walked down the ramp, his footsteps echoing through the courtyard like a giant’s from a fairy tale. She still couldn’t make out his face in the shadows of a blown street lamp, but his voice was a quiet baritone that filled her insides with an instant liquid warmth. It was like hot cider on a snow day, or a burrow made of blankets to read in while rain poured outside. 

It was frankly enraging, how comforting the voice of a stranger was. She knew now, with absolute, complete certainty, that this man was a freaking  _ Alpha _ . Only Alphas had the gift of a voice this calming, and only Alphas with the most potent pheromones. Or, as her health teachers had explained in middle school to a class of horrified Omega preteen girls, an Alpha could have the most powerful effect on the Omega they were most compatible with. The one all the long decades of evolution had determined was their perfect mate.

_ Fuck. No. _

“Yes mom, I made it over. No mom, I don’t need help, everything’s almost done.”

Oh god, he was talking to his mother. 

“Uh huh, we got the couch up just fine.”

Rey drew back behind the corner of the building, her pulse fluttering like a caged, terrified bird.

The first thing she knew was that she was going to start entering and exiting the building from the street side. It would be farther from her bus stop, but worth it to not...smell this smell, to not run the risk of seeing this Alpha again. The second was that he was quickly coming forward toward the dimly lit entrance to his apartment building, and soon, she would finally see his face. 

She didn’t know if she’d recover after that. Portland Sanitation would have to scrape her off the sidewalk and haul her off to the morgue.

Her feet were glued to the concrete, her clenched fists were freezing, but she could do nothing but watch as he stepped under the light and bent to drop the boxes next to the door. He turned, and finally, after what seemed like days, she saw his face.

The scruff of a dark beard caressed his angular chin. His eyes were sloe dark and his mouth was full and sinful and curved just slightly into a smile. He had a beauty mark to the right of a sharp nose that dominated most of his face, but he was beautiful the way a tree could be after being struck by lightning, the way a patch of fire-struck woods could be or a caged wolf. The beauty was tinged with wildness and restless electricity, a familiar thrum that Rey knew as dearly as she knew the ventricles of her own brittle heart.

She didn’t know how she could sense it on him too, could sniff it out behind the black coffee and musk that was just  _ wafting _ from him, but she could feel his waiting just as powerfully as she could feel her own.

One hand brushed through his thick hair, thrusting it back from his face, and she noticed just how long his fingers were, how powerful. 

Something finally snapped at the sight, and Rey ran. 

She ran until she was out of breath and panting, until it slowly dawned on her that she’d left her bus stop behind two blocks back and she’d have to walk three more to the next one. She was dangerously close to frustrated, exhausted tears, but she trudged on in her now-soaking pleather flats, pulling a ragged pair of fingerless gloves and a black beanie from her bag. 

_ Why? _ She wondered, as she passed shut up shops and still-bustling bars, stuffing her hat down over her ears.  _ Why did you have to find me now? _

_ I don’t want you. _

It was a long walk to the next stop, and an even longer wait in the meager shelter in her thin wet stockings and even thinner shoes. (Why she hadn’t worn boots that day was beyond her). At this rate, she would get home at 2 a.m. and be unable to get up at her usual 9. Sundays were spent cleaning and organizing her bills, which she couldn’t do if she was still passed out in bed. 

By the time the bus finally rumbled up, light flecks of snow were gently falling, sticking to her gloves and the sleeves of her jacket as she dug her bus pass out of her jeans pocket and clambered aboard. She sighed and slumped into a seat as close to the front as she could get, her only companion on the journey a sleeping, snoring man with a trash bag over his head, who was sprawled across two seats in the very back.

Rey turned her head to the window and laid her cheek against the cool glass.  _ I really, really don’t want you. _

**

It was 2:25am when Rey got home, after she dragged herself up three flights of cement stairs and fumbled with her apartment key. She stood slumped against her locked door, too dazed to even flick a lamp on.

The only light in the room came from her little fish tank on the kitchen counter, where Millie the IVth, the white betta and the longest surviving of any fish Rey had procured, swirled between the leaves of an  _ anubius nana _ plant. Normally, she would greet the fish, run her fingers across the warm tank, turn on some lights and hook her phone to its combined speaker/charger for ambient sleep music, but tonight...something besides exhaustion crept into the corners of Rey’s mind.

Her apartment was a little square, made to seem slightly larger than it was by the four windows lining the very far wall. There was only enough room for a desk, a queen mattress and box spring she’d saved for a year to buy, and a chest of drawers, where her laptop sat to serve as a television. It wasn’t much. In fact, some people would take one look at it and think it was an inhabitable dump (sometimes she chortled to herself, thinking of what the inhabitants of the tall, freshly constructed Pearl District buildings would think of her little shoebox), but it was hers. 

Quickly shucking her damp jacket, Rey hung it on a hook next to the front door and unbuttoned her cardigan, letting it and the rest of her clothes fall lightly to the floor. Despite the freezing walk to and from various bus stops, the fact that she could barely feel her feet, the light snow now melting in her hair, Rey’s insides were on fire.

Now that she was miles away from that Alpha with his too-large hands and his beauty mark and his wonderful,  _ addicting _ scent, she could do what her body wanted her to do, what her brain had warned her not to do when she first saw him leaning over his kitchen counter: feel the abject wonder of arousal. 

Rey scrambled to the cold pile of covers spread across her bed, stuffing herself beneath them stark naked. She could feel the slick beginning to pool between her thighs, her folds pulsing in time with her frantic heartbeat, as if her body had been on pause until now. 

She had never had a heat. A ward of the state, she’d been stuffed silly with free, off-brand suppressants since taking her blood test at the age of twelve, right after her first menses. The government obviously wanted to keep her from getting pregnant, battling harsh statistics of teen matings, but the side effects of years on suppressants still wore on Rey. She barely had an appetite most days, she smelled like hospital chemicals, and arousal was usually difficult.

Generally around two weeks before her period like clockwork, she would need to use the vibrator Finn and Poe had purchased for her as a gag gift one year (a gag gift she never told them she actually used), but even then, on the rare day she’d soak her cotton underwear with slick, Rey never felt anything compared to this...this rush of blood to her core that was almost painful. 

A milk carton pilfered from behind a Kroger stood next to her bed as a nightstand. In a cotton drawstring behind her alarm clock, was her fully charged pink vibrator. Ignoring the lurid color of the smooth silicone, Rey jerked it out of the bag and pressed the on button. She needed no segue, no hesitant touches to her breasts or soft caresses between her thighs.

One glimpse of a man she couldn’t have, wouldn’t have, a man who would thoroughly and complete destroy her, and Rey was as ready as she ever could be.

She’d barely pressed the tip of the vibrator to her clit before her first orgasm rolled through her in a thigh-shaking, breath-stealing wave. She pressed her face into her pillow and bit her lip to trap the resulting sounds: small, panting moans and heavy gasps. Another climax edged past the first and Rey could only ride them out, powerless to her body’s urges and the desperation of her imagination. In her mind, the Alpha licked his full, pale pink lips and rumbled in that rich, soft voice as his powerful hands, dotted with small freckles like constellations, held her hips firmly to the mattress,  _ good girl. _

_ Good Omega. _

_ Yes _ , her lonely mind whispered.  _ Alpha is pleased with me.  _

_ Finally. _

By the time she was finished, covered with sweat and slick and sobbing with a distressing combination of satisfaction and shame, it was nearly four.


	3. savages. you come in with a bag,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IT GETS ANGSTAY. I can't help it!!! No Ben in this chapter, but things will start in the next one!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is going to get a tad political soon. Or actually now, haha. I live in Portland (hi PDX readers!!) and I'll be drawing in some parallels between Proud Boys/Conservative Incels and the group I use here called Proud Alphas, along with Alpha Freedom Party, Rut & Honor (haha see what I did there), etc. Portland has plenty of political protests that we are warned about where I work in case violence occurs, so I'll be drawing on my own experiences here. I will also briefly discuss the intersections of race, gender, and designation as we continue the story.

The next morning dawned in a gray, misty haze, too cold to be comfortable, but too warm for any of the promised snow to stick. Rey’s apartment was so cold she could see a hint of her breath as she lay sprawled under a pile of blankets, inhaling and exhaling gently, gooseflesh tickling her exposed thighs and stomach.

In her...rush last night, she’d forgotten to turn the heat on. 

She’d forgotten other things too, like washing her face...and underwear.

There was a crick in her neck from her still-twisted hair, her nipples were painfully pebbled, and she could feel the beginnings of a charley horse in her right calf, which had somehow twisted in the night.

But Rey couldn’t bring herself to care, let alone struggle up from her mattress to adjust the thermostat. She just stared up at the pockmarked ceiling, cursing herself.

Bits and pieces of last night flooded back: her hand between her legs, the Alpha’s wet, pink mouth. The goddamned vibrator. Her ridiculous reptile brain Omega-voice whispering “finally” like it had been waiting for her to have a sexual fantasy on that level for years.

It probably had. She’d realized long ago that that side of her brain was utterly useless.

 _Why me?_ She asked herself, hands curling into tight fists. She felt the prick of frustrated tears at the corners of her eyes. _I don’t want this. I don’t want to dream that I’m not alone anymore, only to wake up by myself. Again._

After several moments of numb silence during which she could feel the ghost of what she’d done in her thighs and between her icy legs, Rey finally pulled an abandoned throw pillow from the side of her bed and screamed into it.

**

The following Tuesday found her back at the office after a weekend of barely thinking about the _apartment_. A weekend spent doing things, being busy. Things like texting Finn during his heat, avoiding messages from her more social and overzealous coworkers, watching reruns of Frasier or the Office, and doing laundry. 

Actually folding her laundry too. Organizing the month’s bills.

Adult things.

Okay, that was a lie. It was more like a weekend of doing nothing _but_ thinking about that cursed apartment and forgetting all about the finance planner that sat at her desk and the laundry basket waiting by the door, expectant.

Rey had allowed herself two days. Two days of putting off life for desperate orgasms. Two days of dreams that were either painfully sexual and left her trembling, or so soft that she woke up crying. 

She’d seen the Alpha twice, and she’d already dreamt of them entangled together in her bed, their hands pressed together as he smiled at her startled face. Smiled in a way that left her heart feeling as if it had been trodden on. They hadn’t even been naked in the dream, in fact they were fully dressed, just looking at each other. 

It was sickening. She expected the pervy dreams, they were part of being an Omega. But romantic ones?

Not okay.

After all the rather...emotionally charged nonsense of the weekend, to say Rey arrived at work on Tuesday in a foul mood was an understatement. Today at least, she wore proper footwear for the forecasted heavy rain, entered the building on the street side instead of through the courtyard, and came prepared.

 _Not today Satan_ , she told herself as she marched to her seat with five minutes to spare, weaving around Tally’s row. _I will not look at him. I will not stalk him. There will be no Alpha at all, just customer service._

_God, why do I have to be cursed with this designation and its bullshit. WE DON’T EVEN KNOW EACH OTHER!!! HE COULD BE A SEX OFFENDER!!! OR GOING THROUGH A PAINFUL DIVORCE!_

She was so distracted by her frantic thoughts that she almost missed Tally waving at her as she passed her row. 

Not smiling, barely even able to smirk, Rey waggled her fingers in a half-assed reply. She liked her coworkers, she really did, but most, like Tally, were Betas or completely undesignated at all. Just normal humans with normal human problems that could be helped with antidepressants, with therapy, with _self-care_.

Rey couldn’t even try most antidepressants. They either made her _more miserable_ , or counteracted her suppressants, so every Alpha in a ten mile radius knew she was coming and where she was at in her cycle. The Association of Omega Psychology Practitioners was supposed to be conducting trials for a medication that worked _with_ suppressants, but Rey doubted she would see it in her lifetime. 

Despite her own state of Oregon being fairly liberal when it came to designation issues, there were other places in the USA where Omegas weren’t nearly as lucky or represented, and their issues were considered ridiculous. Places like Alabama, where it was still legal to forcibly mate Omegas and put them in cages. Or Florida, whose representatives were now battling it out on Congress over repealing free access to suppressants.

It was a shitshow most of the time, being designated.

But Rey knew she was privileged. She was white, for one thing. And a heterosexual cisfemale. Access to proper treatment and medications dwindled depending on your ethnicity, gender identity and sexuality, something that only few politicians ever spoke of or focused on.

And she was employed. Employed at a company that provided insurance in case free access was repealed. Employed in a system that either had quotas on how many people like her they could hire, or didn’t care how they was treated by Alphas when they were working.

The upper management at Resistance Tech only consisted of a few Alphas, because, as Rey’s lead Jannah had told her once, they realized how counterintuitive it was to forcibly combine designations in an office environment. The only other Omegas Rey knew of who worked here were her manager Snap and Cathy, both of whom were long mated and not likely to draw any attention from Alphas. 

With all this, there really wasn’t much for Rey to discuss with people like Tally, despite that secret part of her that desperately wanted a normal friendship. Or any friendship at all. 

It bordered on elitist, Rey knew, to push off friendships because of designation. When she had presented as a nervous preteen, that same thing had happened to her. She’d transferred to an all-Omega high school, and the Betas she’d known had dropped her like a hot coal. 

Omegas were too clingy. Omegas needed too much. _They_ were too much.

In the end, her only friend had been Finn. Finn knew what it was like to be truly alone in the world with no family and an itch nature had placed underneath your skin, an itch that refused to be anything but scratched.

Before Rey could walk too far away, Tally reached out and poked her gently on the hip. Unused to physical contact from anyone outside of herself, Rey startled like a nervous horse, nearly tripping over her own two feet.

Giving her an odd look, Tally pressed the mute button on her headset cord and covered the mic just in case. “Check Slack,” she whispered, before winking and returning to her call. Rey could hear the muffled sounds of a man yelling from her position, frozen in the aisle, two feet away.

Rey had been forced into a private channel on the company’s Slack two weeks after starting at Resistance Tech. It was called would-die-for-more-PTO and basically consisted of a dozen or so of her coworkers bitching about customers, arranging social events Rey never attended, and spilling copious amounts of gossip. 

She occasionally participated when spoken to, offered gifs or memes she usually only sent to Finn. But today? She wasn’t in the mood. 

As she turned the corner to her row, Rey decided she _definitely_ wasn’t in the mood now.

One of her pod mates had opened the blinds while she was gone, maybe in an attempt to give her plants sun, or to try to soak up as much vitamin D as was possible during a Pacific Northwest midwinter. Dappled light filtered across the concrete floor, the mostly immaculate white desks, and Rey, tired and bitter as she was, hated it on sight.

The row was filled at this time of day, and everyone was too busy chatting into their headsets for Rey to ask if she could _please_ close the damn blinds.

She was forty five seconds into clocking in, studiously avoiding the window and the view beyond it because she was both too shy and too stubborn to ask her nearest neighbor if they wouldn’t mind her closing the blinds, when her Slack pinged.

It was Cathy, of all people, writing to the **would-die-for-more-PTO** group:

 **Cathy Lo:** @rniima’s here, group. Someone tell her what happened this morning :)

 **Tally:** REYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY YOU MISSED A NAKED GUY!!!

Rey paled, her stomach twisting as she opened up her phone app and turned her status to Available. 

**Rey Niima:** A naked _what?_

Several coworkers responded to her message with the popular and almost sacred party parrot emoji (which was exactly what it sounded like, a dancing parrot), including...two managers. Rey sighed. Everyone must be getting cabin fever.

 **Norra Wexley** : Opening shift got to see the new guy in the apartment across the courtyard taking a shower. We didn’t see him naked or anything, but boi works out, lemme say.

 **Rose Tico:** Biceps for days, my friend!!!

 **Cova Nell** : Someone needs to buy curtains before we see something else, if you know what I mean ;)

This message was followed up with several others, including a meme their lead Snap had made to mock the group’s general excitement, sent with a sarcastic **you all disgust me** , but Rey wasn’t focusing.

She knew without a shadow of a doubt that they had seen the Alpha from last night. The one she’d hoped to completely ignore until she went to sleep that night and her brain betrayed her again.

Of course he’d come back to haunt her. She did sit directly across from his bedroom. Still, it was uncomfortable reading her coworkers’ comments on his body. Did he know he was basically on Macy’s window, as her last foster mother used to say. 

**Rey Niima:** Shouldn’t someone tell him? Contact his apartment’s super or something?

 **Cathy Lo:** Absolutely not, it was the most exciting thing I’ve seen in twenty years.

 **Snap:** Cathy, don’t make me write you up for sexual harassment.

 **Cathy Lo:** :P :P 

Rey sighed. Again.

**

The beginning of Rey’s shift passed like any other. She covered a sick coworker’s tech support chat shift, she emailed several irate customers who thought initiating billing inquiries in caps would get them somewhere, and call blended into call. 

The Slack chat kept going, her coworkers discussing the merits of the new tenant’s chest muscles, and Rey finally had to mute it so she could get some work done. She’d already allowed herself one drawn out look at his apartment to get it out of her system, the way one of her foster mothers used to allow herself one mini chocolate ice cream after the younger children were put to bed. As if _just looking_ was a particularly sinful treat. 

She’d found the apartment dark and empty, save for freshly arranged furniture. The leather couch was now draped with a turquoise throw blanket and a matching wingback chair had joined it overnight. Across from both, a fairly good sized flat screen sat mounted to the exposed brick wall. The living room was the only section of the apartment not covered in boxes. 

But _he_ , the person she was looking for, was gone.

Her sigh of relief as she turned back to her monitor ended in a shudder.

**

Around 4:00, when most of the openers started to trickle out of the office, Rey received a private message from Snap.

 **Snap** : Hey Rey, didn’t see you in the main chat. Wanted to tell you RT’s paying for Ubers home tonight for all later shift employees, you included.

Eyebrows raised, Rey set her phone status to _removed from queue_ so she could properly reply. 

**Rey Niima:** Hey Snap. Awesome, I appreciate it. Any particular occasion?

Her messenger window let her know that _Snap Wexley_ was _typing_. In the scant few seconds it took for him to reply, she typed her own reply to a customer in the support chat, and then took a few moments to lean back in her padded chair, rolling her neck just to hear it pop. Her tender mating gland, hidden under the high collar of her cardigan, throbbed just a bit from the contact.

 **Snap:** Proud As’ march in Couch Park. News reports say it could get violent, we don’t want anyone out on the street after their shift just in case.

Rey immediately flipped to the main work chat, snorting to herself. Couch Park was only three blocks away, and any protests would surely march down the street in front of their building. She’d worked for other companies that would completely close down if the Proud Alphas or Alphas First had a march planned. They were ridiculous, almost laughable online, downright dangerous in person. The groups’ main focuses were on removing blockers and suppressants as “treatments” for designations, because Alphas were superior and should be unfettered by medication. One Alpha off their blockers was dangerous enough around unmated Omegas, but an entire group?

Rey felt the beginnings of a stress headache building behind her temples. 

The main chat channel was now full of commentary on the upcoming protest, despite Cathy’s attempts to draw them back to the subject of their neighbor’s pectorals. Several coworkers Rey knew to be Betas had sent memes mocking the group, or gifs with eyerolls. 

_Of course they would think it’s all a joke_ , Rey thought bitterly. _These Alphas seem like jerks hopped up on testosterone to them, not a potential death trap._

As she stared at the line of images, rubbing her temples, her phone pinged from her back pocket. 

It wasn’t encouraged to check devices before 5pm, but Rey found herself as apathetic to a possible work reprimand as she was to doing her laundry over the weekend. She sat up on one hip to drag her phone out of her pocket.

It was a message from Poe. 

**Poe: Hey Rey, you doing okay? We haven’t heard from you today and Finn’s worried with the protests downtown. Let me know <3**

Rey let out a heavy sigh, pushing her phone under her monitor riser and returning to Snap’s message. She’d answer Finn and Poe later.

She wasn’t exactly _okay_ and didn’t feel much like lying. 

**Rey Niima:** Is this because of my...designation? Or a general safety precaution?

It only took Snap a second to reply.

 **Snap Wexley:** You know I don’t want to bs you, Rey. It’s basically you getting a comped ride tonight. None of us want you out there with those creeps. It’s bad enough you’re on the bus at 1am.

Before working at Resistance Tech, Rey had only ever had one other manager care about her personal life, how she got to and from work, her safety at night. That had been her last foster mother and the closest to the real thing Rey had ever known. It had taken thirteen years to get to her, but she still, like all the others, hadn’t adopted Rey. Nor had she called in two weeks.

 **Snap Wexley:** Jannah and I don’t want to seem condescending about this. I just know what it’s like to have to worry about these things. Not the same way as a woman, obviously, but I just wanted to give you an option. 

Maybe it was that Alpha and all of the angst that came with him, or the helplessness Rey associated with her designation, but her eyes welled up with frustrated tears. She blinked furiously, trying to will them down again, but anger and sadness bubbled up in her chest like heartburn. 

Sometimes, maybe once or twice a year, when she was absolutely alone in the darkness with nothing but her lizard brain for company and her apartment walls seemed to close in on her, she let the Omega inside of her wish for a mate. Someone who could see her, know her, every single layer, even the smoldering, rancid ruins of her heart from those long years of waiting, years of wondering. Years of another voice whispering _you will never be enough_. 

Two tiny, furious tears rolled down her cheeks, dripping onto the shoulders of her moss green cardigan.

An Uber ride at the end of the night sounded awfully good right now.

 **Rey Niima:** This isn’t condescending at all. I appreciate it, and I’ll take it. :)

Before Rey could wipe the moisture from her cheeks and move on to the several chat customers now waiting for a response, she felt a soft hand clasp her shoulder. She nearly shrieked, until Cathy spoke near her ear.

“Rey honey, are you okay?”

Cathy Lo was a middle-aged woman with black hair brushed gray and the kindest smile Rey had ever seen. She was short and round and _soft_ , always dressed in cashmere sweaters she’d knitted herself, her hands freshly moisturized and smooth. She made the best Vietnamese food Rey had ever tasted, and no matter who she spoke to or how loudly they yelled or cursed, no one had ever heard her raise her voice.

The only time she was ever excited was when shirtless men were involved, to the amusement of the entire office. She also had several grown children, and Rey sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a mother like her, with sweet eyes and gentle hands.

“Rey?”

“Oh, um. I’m fine Cathy.” 

Cathy didn’t need to bend to reach Rey, and she didn’t need eye contact to know the words were a lie either. She smoothed her hand over Rey’s shoulder, briefly brushing her mating gland in a sign of maternal affection as she manipulated them both into a one-armed hug. Rey’s gland warmed in response, those stubborn tears thickening in her throat. She let go of her mouse, not bothering to remove her tangled headset as she pressed her face to Cathy’s shoulder. Her fingers reached out to touch Cathy’s pale pink, v-neck sweater, flexed once, and fell back on the desk. Touch was a bridge that Rey couldn’t quite cross.

The older woman smelled like Omega and comfort: like freshly washed blankets, warm pastries, melting butter. It was laced with a smell like cut pumpkins, fallen leaves. A smell that always reminded Rey of the beginning of Autumn. It was undoubtedly her husband, but it amplified her scent. 

She was a perfect example of what Omegas represented: comfort. Rey was tempted to ask her if she was born that way, if her tenderness had been natural, if she’d had no choice _but_ to be kind.

Thankfully, Rey didn’t cry as she was gathered from a one-armed hug to a full embrace, her headset trapped painfully between her ear and Cathy’s clavicle, but she wished she could. She wished this was another place, and she was another person. A person who could fully give herself to a hug like this from a virtual stranger, who could actually _return_ the physical contact in the first place.

“You poor thing,” Cathy said, running her other hand over Rey’s scalp. “It’s a stressful time to be an Omega isn’t it? It always has been, but some years are worse than others.”

Rey finally disentangled herself enough to remove her headset, placing it next to her keyboard with shaking fingers. Cathy gave her arms one last pat and stepped away, a line of concern etched between her thin black brows.

Rey could only shrug. “It is,” she said. “Sometimes.”

 _Every minute of my damn life_.

“You mean always?” Cathy said, giving Rey a small, conspiratorial smile. “I hope Snap’s at least getting you a ride home tonight. My husband is five hundred percent Alpha and I wouldn’t want to be out there. Albert and I could pick you up-”

“Oh no,” Rey hurried to reassure her, waving a hand, as if a group of one hundred pissed off Alphas who thought raping Omegas was perfectly acceptable were just part of her daily life. “Snap’s paying for an Uber tonight. I appreciate it though.”

The small smile at the edges of Cathy’s mouth curled into a grin, crinkling the corners of her eyes. 

“Good,” she said, patting Rey’s shoulder again. “Good.”

They waved to each other as Cathy headed off down the aisle to Tally’s row to hug her goodbye, and Rey was surprised to feel just how much that one touch had affected her.

An hour or so later, after she caught up on her support chats and was back swimming through phone calls, she still felt warm.

**

Around 6pm, the office was empty and silent except for the rumble of the radiator. 

Snap added money to Rey’s Uber app before he left, patting her on the shoulder and telling her, with a stern frown she knew was from concern, to stay safe. Even Jannah stopped by on her way out, when she usually rushed for the bus.

 _Pity_ , was Rey’s first assumption. _They feel sorry for me_ . Alone, unmated, still young. _Omega._ Not safe.

It wasn’t until she messaged Poe back, letting him know everything was okay and what Snap had done for her, that she realized.

 _They care about me_.

 **Poe:** Good. Snap’s a good guy, he’ll make sure you’re okay. Let us know if you need anything, anytime. Stay safe. We love you.

It was lucky her break was at 6:15, because without warning, Rey was in tears. They rushed up painfully, choking her, making her splutter, streaking her face and neck with moisture. Through hazy, blurred vision, she managed to locate her phone and turn it off before crumpling across her desk. Her sobs were loud and sudden and panicked in the empty room. All the stress, the shame, the disappointment from the last few days, the last eighteen years hit her like a brick to the chest. 

Those words. _We love you_. It was common for Poe and Finn to say and write them. They signed off every phone call letting her know she was cared for, but she hadn’t realized how much she needed to hear them today. How little she heard them otherwise.

Rey laid her forehead on the cool, pale wood of her desk, turned toward her little row of succulents in their prism-shaped pots on the windowsill. She allowed herself, as she had allowed herself the weekend, to cry until her chest ached and her eyes burned. She hadn’t in so long, it felt like a release.

 _We love you_.

 _Oh Finn,_ she thought, wrapping her thin arms around her stomach in a pale imitation of a hug. She trembled now, and her throat felt raw, as if she’d been screaming. _Poe. I love you more than I love myself sometimes, but I wish I wasn’t so alone._

Rey stayed that way for the entirety of her fifteen minute break, just embracing herself and thoroughly soaking her sweater with streams of tears. It was the longest she’d cried in years. Finally, as she neared a seventeen minute break, she wiped her sopping face several times on the sleeves of her cardigan and turned her phone back on, replacing her headset. 

And it was then, as she was checking every inbox to see if there was any work to distract her from her faintly trembling body and emotional trauma, she glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye. The corner that faced the window, which in turn faced the apartment across the courtyard.

“Really?” she whispered, but turned anyway just to look. Maybe she didn’t want an Alpha in reality, only dreamt of one the way someone else would soak themselves in a romance novel, only craved one when she was truly lonely and the dark seemed to last for days, but she needed _something_ tonight. Who knew, her new neighbor could even be a Proud Alpha (or god forbid, a member of Rut and Honor) who had just moved out of his mother’s basement, but she _needed this_ . She didn’t _need_ an Alpha, or a boyfriend in general, but she needed _something_. Some back muscles would do, at least.

(Or maybe, she really did want an Alpha in her life. Someone to look at her like she hung the sun and moon, someone to discuss books with, to show her nest to, to talk with for hours. Someone who was constructed by nature to be her exact match. And she was too stubborn, too hurt to truly process that. 

Or maybe, she just needed therapy). 

To her surprise when she turned to look, she wasn’t greeted with the sight of a massive man. Instead, a small black cat sat primly on his windowsill, lamplike yellow eyes staring directly across the distance toward Rey.

For the first time in hours, days even, Rey smiled.


	4. hold it out to me in silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the amazing comments, kudos, reads, etc. I appreciate every single one of you. 
> 
> Also to give some context for the story, the chapter titles are lines from a poem by Louise Gluck. The poem is:
> 
> _I have heard about the civilized,  
>  the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. but you and i are  
> savages. you come in with a bag,  
> hold it out to me in silence.  
> I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it  
> and understand the message: I have  
> pleased you greatly last night. We sit  
> quietly, side by side, to eat,  
> the long pancakes dangling and spilling,  
> fragrant sauce dripping out,  
> and glance at each other askance, wordless,  
> the corners of our eyes clear as spear points  
> laid along the sill to show  
> a friend sits with a friend here._
> 
> I've also increased the chapter count because I'll be adding interludes from other povs throughout, probably every 4-5 chapters. Next up: Ben's POV. <3

__

_“How we need another soul to cling to.”_

_―_ Sylvia Plath

Despite the stress surrounding the protest, the Proud Alphas ended up doing something very Proud Alpha, and very _very_ Portland: only five of them showed up, when over one hundred were originally estimated to attend. When Rey researched during her lunch the night before, news outlets and social media pages had described the event as _possibly flooding the park_ , when the reality was quite the opposite.

The only flooding that occurred was from the heavy downpour.

Holding signs showing prescription bottles and messages like YOU CAN’T HOLD US DOWN and ALPHA DOMINANCE IS NATURAL, the tiny group braved the rain to yell at a masked circle of Beta counter protesters across the park. 

Rey watched the entire thing live on Instagram, as she sat safely in the back of an Uber on her way home, chuckling and warm. 

When she finally crawled into bed at the end of the night after feeding Millie IV and watching her follow her finger across the tank for several seconds, she slept better than she had all week.

The next day, she went to the laundromat.

**

The following afternoon found Rey heading to the office in freshly laundered clothes, the feeling of satisfaction at finally _Adulting_ undeniable. She wore a yellow cardigan this time under her long black coat hood pulled up against the drizzle, her hair combed and braided, with soft jeans and her only pair of winter boots.. Her financial planner was filled out and neatly tucked into the front pocket of her messenger bag and her bed back home was finally freshly made, blankets carefully folded, sheets and pillow cases replaced.

She’d even vacuumed.

It felt good. So good in fact, that Rey was practically buoyant with happiness. Such a change from the days before, when the weather seemed to reflect her mood. She knew the depression would be back. It always returned just like Portland never went without rain for long, but for now, she wanted to take advantage of the upturn for as long as humanly possible.

She was so high on her success (and perhaps a little high on that video of Alpha failure from the night before. Idiots) that she didn’t realize she was heading toward the courtyard entrance to her building, until she smelled it. 

Sandalwood. Musk. Forest in winter. The perfect breakfast. It hit her like a slap, as fresh and sharp and beautiful as it had been the night he moved in.

 _Oh no_ , she thought, pulling up short on the sidewalk. Someone behind her sighed as they nearly collided, turning to glare as they skirted around her on their way into the lofts. Surprising, considering most people in the area tended to not make eye contact at all.

Of course this would happen, Rey was so used to coming this way that it was almost muscle memory by now. And it would be ridiculous to change that now. 

She’d done everything she’d planned on doing in a weekend in _one day_. She could do this now.

Rey hadn’t dreamt of the Alpha last night, and she sure as hell hadn’t done anything with her nether bits. The cloud of depression had cleared. She could _do this_. It would be like walking by her favorite bakery or coffee shop every morning and appreciating the wonderful sights and smells, despite not having the money to purchase anything inside.

She was used to wanting things she couldn’t have.

Rey straightened her earbuds, disentangling them from her coat zipper, and headed toward the courtyard, determined. She hit play on her meditation app on her way, staring fixedly down at her phone.

 _I am more than my designation,_ the narrator intoned, filling Rey’s ears with a soft, serene feminine voice. Binaural sounds rolled in the background, sending shivers down her spine and across her scalp. _I am more than my instincts._

_I am human._

_I am myself._

It was a bit dramatic, but during that Uber ride last night, Rey decided to search for Omega-specific meditations instead of going for the general app she always used on her way to and from work. Maybe it would help, she’d told herself. 

And to her surprise, it did. It was the reason behind her dreamless sleep the night before, the peace she felt when she woke up the next morning, her radiator rumbling and her body warm and comfortable. _I am more than my designation. I am myself._

 _I am myself._ Maybe that, more than anything, was what she needed to hear.

 _Repeat after me_ , the voice murmured in Rey’s ears as she crossed the cobblestones. _I am more than my designation_.

“I am more than my designation,” Rey whispered. “I am more than my instincts.” 

She pocketed her phone and kept going, even chancing a look at the loft apartments. 

And that was her first mistake.

No amount of meditation or determination could prepare her for who was sitting on the bench by the side entrance, under the awning, looking out across the courtyard.

It was the Alpha.

 _Shit shit bugger bastard fuck_ . Just when things were going fine. _They were_ _fine_ _!_

He was even more massive up close. His long, jean clad legs were spread just enough for him to lean his elbows on his knees. Rey couldn’t help but notice that despite the space next to him being empty, he didn’t overtake it or manspread like so many other Alphas. In fact, he seemed to be folded in on himself in an attempt to take up _less_ space. 

He was hunched over his thighs, only wearing a burgundy sweater that clung to his shoulders and chest as if it were tailored just to fit him. No coat, no hat. Just a sweater. Rey had heard that Alphas ran hot. Poe nearly always felt like he was running a fever, but no coat in 36 degree pre-snow weather was a bit excessive.

At the sight of him, big, practically vibrating with the simple act of being alive, and _right there,_ Rey’s heart gave a sudden, horrible bang. She pressed a gloved hand to her sternum as the pounding echoed in her ears. She could swear it was so loud that the man, sitting just a scant thirty or so feet from her, could hear it perfectly.

It took a moment, a brief pause where Rey stood in the middle of the rain-darkened cobblestones, feeling her own pulse as the woman in her ears told her to _let go_ and _clear her mind_ , staring at a stranger, before the Alpha actually noticed her. Noticed. Her.

He wasn’t reading a book or holding a phone or smoking a cigarette or a joint. Or god forbid, vaping, which always smelled like bile to Rey’s sensitive nose, no matter the flavor. He literally just sat, one of his knees bouncing slightly as he stared at the front door of her building. His brow was furrowed, his thick hair waved back from his face, and his profile reminded her of the old Roman coins she’d seen in Art History courses in college, with their proud, aquiline noses and stern lips. 

But his profile turned, and suddenly, abruptly, as if the earth had suddenly tilted off its axis, he was looking at her. 

Rey felt that single look like lightning in her abdomen. She froze, a deer before a wolf, as what should have been a brief appraisal from him turned into a stare. His jaw slackened a bit, his eyes widened, and he straightened as if shocked. She saw him take a small sniff, delicate for a man of such size who took up nearly the entire bench, and then he was sitting up, his legs closing. Rey’s frantic, frightened brain couldn’t help but notice that he had perfect posture.

And that his face was as intent as any other predator’s.

 _I am more than my designation_ , the meditation continued on in her ears. _Repeat after me, friends. I am more than my instincts._

Rey doubted it at that moment, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t will her legs to _walk already_ . _Do your one job._

They just stared at each other, and Rey’s stomach was like a wild, roiling thing inside of her. His smell sharpened, more musk and pine than coffee and pancakes, and it slid through her like the beginnings of arousal. It was both wonderfully comforting, like the smell of burning firewood or a winter hike, but terrifying too. She had the distinct feeling that the Alpha was scenting her, and that if he continued, something would happen. Something she wasn’t quite ready for.

He moved suddenly, almost quicker than her eyes could follow, unfolding himself to his full height. He was even taller than she had expected, well over six feet and built like a mix of a swimmer and a boxer. Thick, powerful arms and back tapered to a toned waist, like an upside down triangle. The movement, though subtle, as if he were trying to not seem predatory, still startled Rey. She actually jumped like a rabbit sensing a fox, and finally her legs were working again. Stunned back to life, it seemed.

Before the Alpha could say something to her, before he could cross the space that separated them or even just move forward, Rey ran. She didn’t care how obvious she was acting, how weird she looked running at top speed away from a man who hadn’t said a word to her, but she could tell he wanted to, and it scared her more than his scent did.

She nearly crashed into the glass doors of her building in her haste, pausing briefly to hurl the door open and startle a group of men dressed in suits who were attempting to exit. 

“Um, sorry. ‘Scuse me,” she muttered, hurling herself across the tiled floor to the elevators. 

Rey repeatedly pressed the up button, glancing in a panic toward the building entrance, which was still blocked by the group of businessmen.She barely smelled the Alpha now, just the scents of human cologne and starch mixed with sweat, so he couldn’t have followed her. _Thank god._

As the elevator dinged and the men in suits finally left, pulling out umbrellas and revealing that they were tourists (no one in Portland used an umbrella. They just got soaked or spent way too much money at REI), Rey suddenly had an unobstructed view of the courtyard.

And the Alpha.

He hadn’t moved. He was still standing, his hair a bit wilder now as if he’d just run a hand through it, but...Rey’s heart clenched...he was still staring at her. The expression on his face wasn’t threatening, as if he were about to go into rut or to take her by any means necessary (she’d seen that expression before, and never wanted to again). 

It was thoughtful, almost sad. 

_Alpha is disappointed_ , her lizard brain made its debut for the day, almost sibilant compared to the warm voice of the narrator in her ears. _We’ve_ _disappointed him_.

“Oh shut it, you,” Rey muttered. The elevator doors finally slid open and she rushed inside, thankful it was empty for once. She was already going slightly mad, so she was unsurprised by the quote that came, unbidden, to her mind as she pressed the button for her floor and sank against the wall.

Of course it would be Shakespeare.

_Exit, pursued by a bear._

**

To say the entirety of Resistance Tech’s Support Team was amused by last night’s happenings (or lack thereof) would be a vast understatement. Alphas’ Rights groups were usually a source of derision and amusement, but Rey had never seen so many Betas and undesignateds actually involving themselves, mocking the oppressor.

When she was finally able to stumble to her desk after several minutes spent outside the elevator trying to get a grip on her racing pulse and trembling knees, she found the main Slack channel filled with Alphas First memes. To the amusement of her coworkers, who were leaning over their keyboards, trying to suppress their laughter.

Slumping in her seat, Rey scrolled through the channel. Even Jessica Pava, one of the more serious leads, had participated. If she weren’t so shellshocked, it would be hilarious, but Rey could still see the Alpha’s sad expression, the downward curl of his lips, as if he knew she would run away.

As if he wasn’t surprised at all.

Suddenly, a sharp clap sounded from the front of the office, making Rey jump horribly in her seat. Clutching her chest, she leaned around her twin monitors to see _what the hell_ was going on.

Jannah stood next to her desk. Everyone else had looked up too, smiles sliding off their faces. Rey saw Tally glance up guiltily, covering her mouth to hide her laughter.

“Okay people,” Jannah called. She had a gift for commanding an audience just with her voice, and she wasn’t even an Alpha. “We realize Alphas First is a group of sentient goat gonads, but we need to actually get some work done today.”

Everyone snickered, even Rey, though halfheartedly.

 _They could laugh at this_ , she found herself thinking again. _It’s not like most of them could ever be mated against their will._

“If you’re off the phones and still need a second to get it together,” she looked pointedly at Norra and Rose, who sat beside each other and were both covering their mouths, overcome with body-shaking giggles. “Take two and then get back to it. Voicemails are piling up. Memes can wait, we have pissed off morons to corral.”

As if they were a platoon receiving an order from an officer, everyone snapped back to their monitors with serious expressions. One of the benefits of working at Resistance Tech in Rey’s mind, was the complete disdain the managers had for customers. 

Her panic and trembling had subsided during Jannah’s speech, thankfully, and she was able to login to her phone with steady fingers. 

_I won’t think about you,_ she thought, as her phone immediately began to trill. 

“Thank you for calling Resistance Technologies, this is Rey. How can I assist you today?”

“Where’s my on switch?”

Here we go.

_It was just a fluke anyway, we probably won’t ever see each other again. Right?_

How wrong she was.

**

The office cleared a bit later than usual, most of the morning Support Team associates staying late to complete bits of the workflow that had gone by the wayside earlier in the day. Snap and Jannah both stayed, answering calls while Norra and Cova covered the overflowing email inbox.

Relief flooded Rey when Snap told her about the overtime offerings. She’d worked in call centers before, always relegated to the night shifts due to her designation, always given the worst days and the most work. Previous managers would just book it and refuse overtime, letting the skeleton crew at night handle the workload until they broke.

Resistance Tech wasn’t a perfect place to work. They still gave her the night shift due to her unmated status (more out of protection than discrimination, but Rey wanted _someone_ to see her as more than an Omega, a victim), still gave her less preferable days, but they never left her unsupported or feeling like rude customers were right. 

By the time her lunch rolled around, Rey’s coworkers were finally trailing out in twos and threes. 

**Snap Wexley:** Alright everyone, good work. See you tomorrow, and I expect better meme quality by then, today’s was pathetic :D Have a good night Rey!

Rey waved over her monitor as Jannah and Snap left last, together, with Jannah’s messenger bag slung over Snap’s shoulder. Their heads were so close they nearly touched as they peered over each others’ phones, whispering. 

“Bye Rey!” Jannah called as they walked out, not looking back.

Rey didn’t blame her. If she were set to leave hours ago, she wouldn’t look back either.

“Bye Jannah, bye Snap!”

Feeling soft and languid in the light of the setting sun, which had streaked the sky with stripes of pink and peach amid the constant Portland cloud cover, Rey logged out of her phone and switched her monitor off. She leaned back in her seat, rolling out the crick in her neck and pushing her shoulder blades together to massage her aching gland.

She was relieved to find she hadn’t thought of the Alpha--or their disastrous moment in the courtyard for a grand total of four hours. Maybe if she could keep it up this long, she could go for _days_ without feeling like a hot, restless, desperate thing, obsessed with someone she didn’t even know because of how he _smelled_ , because of his silhouette behind a window pane. Wouldn’t that be nice?

_I am more than my designation._

Rey gathered up her phone from under her monitor riser as she stood from her chair, stretching up on the very tips of her toes. Her tired, unused muscles clenched and loosened under the pressure, and it was such a wonderful feeling she nearly purred, content as a cat. She stood for a moment, considering the soft patch of sunlight that spilled across her desk, and typed out a message to Finn. His heat should be nearing its end tonight, giving him a better chance of answering with a clear mind.

**Rey: How’s things?**

As she waited for a reply, Rey pulled the peanut butter and honey sandwich she’d made for herself that morning, not exactly in the mood for another ramen cup after weeks and weeks of them. She took a massive bite, chewing with her cheeks puffed up like a chipmunk’s, before it suddenly dawned on her that she hadn’t watered her poor fern all week.

And sure enough, as she glanced over, the stubborn thing _looked_ like it hadn’t been watered in a week.The ends of its normally crisp green leaves were brown and haggard.

“Damn.”

Sandwich in one hand, her water bottle grasped in the other, she scooted herself over to the windowsill, not daring to look beyond her little row of plants.

“You poor thing,” she muttered to the fern, thoroughly saturating its soil before sticking her sandwich straight into her mouth and pouring just a bit of water into her palm. She flicked little droplets into the prism-shaped pots her little succulents had been tucked into, making sure to keep the soil only a little damp. She was really rather terrible with plants, had no clue why she’d decided to bring any to work. 

As she was murmuring more sweet, muffled nothings to her fern around a heavy mouthful of peanut butter, whole wheat bread, and half-ripe banana, Rey decided to just take _one_ look at the opposite window, just to see if the Alpha was even home. It would be ridiculous to avoid her own window all night if he wasn’t even in his apartment.

Her phone pinged from its place on her desk, but she ignored it, not even bothering to take her sandwich out of her mouth as she looked up.

And up.

And up.

God, it was taking _forever_.

Until her eyes found his window. 

His window, which was now framed with dark curtains he must have just hung that day. One curtain was closed and the other was fully open, backlit with golden light from the black chrome lamp next to his couch. 

His occupied couch.

The Alpha sat, his long lean body stretched across the worn brown leather, taking up every inch of the space. The couch nearly took up the whole wall, and yet he was tall enough that his bare feet dangled off the far edge. The television was on, bathing his pale skin in blue light, but he wasn’t looking at it, and his face wasn’t turned in profile. 

Rey nearly fell off her chair, overcome with such a sudden rush of horror and shock that she choked a bit on her sandwich, having to yank it out of her mouth to avoid an emergency. 

_Great Rey,_ _really classy._

Her face flushed crimson as gooseflesh tickled her neck and back, making her gland stiffen. He was looking at _her._

How long had he been doing that? Had he seen her stretch? Had he seen her fake, customer service smile as she went through call after call?

Rey couldn’t really read the look on his face. He wasn’t really smiling, and there wasn’t anything friendly about his massive shoulders, his full lips set, his eyes dark. She felt like crawling under her desk and hiding for the rest of her shift. Had she truly made him that angry when she ran? Were Alphas that easy to offend?

 _Probably_. They’re Alphas, after all. A horrific combination of hormones and rage mixed with a superhuman need for competition. He’d probably seen it as a grave insult. She’d read articles about this, Alphas killing Omegas who didn’t want to mate them, Alphas fighting each other for a mate. She’d sent some to Finn when he’d first met Poe and told her about his designation, to dissuade him. Until Poe had proven just how different he was.

Bugger. It was the last thing she needed, an angry Alpha.

Before Rey could dive under her desk with her sandwich for the remaining fifteen minutes of her lunch period, the Alpha did something even more shocking than frowning at her. He lifted a huge hand, as pale as his face and neck, and awkwardly waved to her. Just once, a simple flick of his fingers from side to side, but Rey felt an answering heat in her belly that was staggering in its power.

He then hopped nimbly up from his couch, graceful and lithe for so big a person, and disappeared from view behind the closed black curtain. 

“Oh thank fuck,” Rey muttered, her trembling hands lifting her sandwich to her lips again just for something to do. She felt small and scared and hunted just being waved at by an Alpha. How would she feel talking to one? Kissing one? Doing more?

The Alpha appeared again around the curtain, and Rey nearly had a heart attack. Thankfully, no pieces of sandwich lodged in her esophagus. “Jesus.”

He had a notebook clutched in one bear paw of a hand, and a pen in the other. Rey squinted in the dying sunlight...was he...writing a note? He was bent over his glass coffee table, slapping the notebook down. 

Oh no.

Was this when he told her how he wanted to kill her and consume her flesh?

Rey frantically wheeled back to her desk, whipping up her phone and unlocking it with furiously shaking fingers. 

**Finn: Good, hungry as hell like always. How are you, Peanut? I feel like we haven’t talked in years.**

How was she. Well, she was about to both be late coming back from her lunch and read her own death notice, all at the same time. How could she word that?

**Rey: I met an Alpha.**

There. Succinct, accurate. Well, if by “met” she meant “ran away from like a mouse.” Rey wiped a hand across her clammy forehead, pushing the wisps of hair that had fallen out of her braid back behind her ears. She closed her eyes and took one of those deep, _deep_ breaths the meditation people were always jabbering about. In through her nose. Pause. Out through her mouth.

She wouldn’t panic. She could always call the Omega Safety Line, get a car out here to escort her to the bus stop when work was done. Just because an Alpha wanted to _kill her_ didn’t mean he would succeed.

When she looked up again, a note written in sharpie on plain white paper was _taped to the window_. The handwriting was beautiful despite the thick black ink, perfectly legible despite the delicate cursive, as if he had an interest in calligraphy.

**MY NAME IS BEN.**

**WHAT'S YOURS?**

**I PROMISE YOU’RE SAFE, I WON’T HURT YOU.**

**503-555-9696 PLEASE, I’D LIKE TO TALK.**

...Well. Hmm.

Rey took her time thinking about it, logging back into the phones and placing her headset over her ears. Every time she glanced over at the window, the Alpha was gone. His little black cat sat on his coffee table in a perfect loaf position, all limbs tucked to their tummy, but his living room was vacated otherwise.

There usually weren’t any calls at this time, and Rey spent the next few hours reading, biting her nails, drawing in Paint, staring up at the cement ceiling and daydreaming. Tonight though, she spent the next fifteen minutes with her fingers in her mouth, glancing nervously from the sign on the window to her phone, which had pinged about eighteen times now with messages from Finn.

Should she?

Could she wrestle up $35 to change her phone number if he sent her a picture of his knot?

Probably.

Rey snatched up her phone with the other hand not occupied in her mouth and opened a new text message, ignoring Finn’s. 

**Rey, to 503-555-9696:** I’m Rey. If you send me a knot pic I will report you to the OSC and make sure you rot, I swear. It’s illegal now.

It was her version of yelling _I’M ARMED!!!_

The response was almost immediate.

 **503-555-9696** : Hi Rey. I promise you, I won’t be sending any...pictures of my anatomy. That’s disgusting, has it really happened to you before?

 **Rey:** Once. And good. 

Rey shuddered at the memory.

 **503-555-9696:** I’m sorry to hear that, no one wants to see a knot up close. I moved in a week ago and I just wanted to apologize too, if you’ve noticed any scents around the building.

 **Rey:** I know you moved in. My window’s right across from yours. And it’s okay, not like you did it on purpose.

 **503-555-9696:** Oh did you?

If it was possible, Rey’s flush deepened, spreading from her gland all the way to her scalp.

 **Rey:** Are you attempting to flirt?

**503-555-9696 : Honestly? Not in the way you might be thinking. I’d like to get to know you, if you’re comfortable talking to me. **

**Rey:** Why?

 **503-555-9696:** A bit jumpy are you? Because I’ve seen you a few times this week. At your window, in the courtyard, on the road out back. I caught your scent and it was...indescribable.

Rey was trembling again, but the nervous shaking had turned into something else. Something molten, that was tingling in her toes and sliding up her legs, making her knees soft and weak. He had noticed her too? How? Wouldn’t she have scented him?

 **Rey:** Indescribable how? And it depends. I have a few questions first. 

**503-555-9696:** Ask away.

She frowned. He hadn’t answered her first question, how would he do with any others?

She decided to just go right for the kill.

 **Rey:** Are you on blockers? Are you mated or have you been? Are you single? How old are you? Do you like your mother? And finally, a stipulation: send me a link to one social media account and your full name, pay for a background check, and I’ll talk to you.

There. That would get rid of him quickly. It always sent the Alphas on Instagram and Facebook scrambling, anyway. Especially the bit about their mothers.

Several moments of silence followed, and Rey felt a mix of smug satisfaction at catching him out and disappointment that he hadn’t stepped up to the plate. Most people weren’t in a rush to push past her walls, the qualifications she had for relationships. She needed to know, desperately, that she could trust someone even on a basic level before she invested any time or energy into them. And she had invested quite a bit into this Alpha already.

Sighing, she backed up through her messenger app to Finn’s conversation.

 **Finn:** WHAT?

WHEN?

HOW? 

WHERE?

I THOUGHT YOU HATED ALPHAS?

DID YOU MEAN _MET MET_ OR LIKE, MET? TELL!!!!!!!!

WJHY ARE YOU TAKKING SO LONG REY!!!!!!!!!

REY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Oh god. 

**Rey:** Holy shit, Peanut, calm down! Eat something. He lives in the apartment across from my window at work. I smelled him when he moved in and Finn...it was ridiculous, how good he smelt. I remember when you told me about Poe, but I didn’t believe you. Poe smelled like motor oil to me, and other Alphas like sweat on steroids. But this Alpha. It was freaking potent.

He noticed me before work today. He wrote me a note asking me to message him.

Rey bit her lip.

 **Rey:** He wanted to talk. I think I already pushed him away.

 _He could be a creep,_ she told herself, as fifteen more minutes slid by like a knife through butter. _He could be a rapist or a serial killer. You did the right thing._

But her ridiculous Omega disagreed.

 _Alpha doesn’t want us,_ it whispered, whining really. 

“Shutupshutup.”

Her phone dinged, making her jump.

It wasn’t Finn.

He’d written a paragraph practically, with a link titled FRCA CERTIFIED BACKGROUND CHECKS.

Oh god, he’d even gotten _the background check_.

If Rey had had any less self control, she would have melted right out of her chair into a puddle on the concrete.

 **503-555-9696:** I like these questions, you know what to ask. That’s smart. Yes, I take high strength blockers. I’ll show the bottle to you. I’m single. I’ve had girlfriends in the past, but never been mated, never dated an Omega actually. They’ve mostly been Betas with one or two Alphas mixed in. I haven’t had the time for dating in a little over six years, but I don’t have casual sex, if you’re at all curious. I’ve never been to a Rut House either. I’m 30 years old. I’m from New York, but my family moved to Portland when I was a teenager to help my uncle with his business. I’m a nerd. I have a computer science degree with an emphasis on programming and I work as a Security Analyst now, mostly from home. I do like my mother. We had a rocky relationship when I was a child, and she ended up sending me from home for awhile to my uncle, but we’ve been close now for years. And no, not in the sense that she still does my laundry. As for the security check, here it is. I’m sorry it took so long. 

Rey’s phone pinged twice more as she stared at the message, her eyes suddenly welling with tears.

Another green bubble popped up under his link.

 **503-555-9696:** Your scent was indescribable because it reminded me of summer. You smelled like sunscreen, like sunlight on sidewalks, like daisies, like a beach in the middle of July. My family used to go to the beach every summer for years, and you smell just the way the ocean and the sand did when I was a child. The reason I wanted to speak with you, and the reason why your scent was indescribable to me, was because you smelled like every good memory I’ve ever had.

 _Like every good memory I’ve ever had_.

Rey burst into tears.


	5. interlude i: ben. "kylo ren is dead. my son is alive."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a tiny one, but I owe you all a Ben POV! :)

_“The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.”_

Jonathan Safran Foer, _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_

_“The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.”_

Arundhati Roy, _The Ministry of Utmost Happiness_

Ben Solo, 30, single and living with his cat, still wearing his clothes from the night before, stretches on his new couch, in his new apartment. He’d woken up here, his neck twisted and aching, the light from both his bay window and the tv nearly blinding him. Punisher is stretched out along his chest like a soft black neckwarmer, snuffling in her sleep as Ben considers the watery sunlight, squinting. 

Portland.

He never thought he’d see this shithole again.

(The things you do for love. Or guilt.)

The city of his adolescence. Perfect really, considering what he was like as a teenager.

The term _kids_ used these days...what was it?

Emo?

Wouldn’t begin to cover it. His mood and the weather had constantly battled with each other when he was a teen, locked up in his room with his computer setup and music screaming misery in his ears. As soon as the plane had set down thirty six hours ago, he’d felt it again: the pressure of the rain, the endless slate sky, the fog. Felt it like a weighted blanket draped over his shoulders, felt a scowl began to work its way across his features.

He stays sprawled in the armchair for a few moments, considering the black and white western playing on the television. A Gary Cooper film. What was it... _the Cowboy and the Lady_ , something like that? Han had watched all of them when Ben was a child. He distantly remembers Sunday mornings spent with his father in pajamas, flipping to Turner Classic Movies, sipping coffee. 

He really should shower, Leia’s arriving in -- he considers his father’s watch -- fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes.

_Shit._

Before he can even force himself to wake up his sleeping cat and disentangle her from his shirt, a sharp _tap_ _tap_ sounds at the door, before the scrape of a key.

“Knock knock Benjamin, it’s your mother. You know, the woman who gave you life, who you never call.”

 _Shit._ Why is she always early? First time seeing his new place, and he hasn’t showered since New York.

“I’m here mom,” he calls back as the door swings inward, revealing Leia Organa Solo in all her glory. Dark sunglasses despite the oppressive rain, hair immaculately braided and coiffed, dressed in a lavender business suit, a briefcase in one perfectly manicured hand. Her posture is more stooped than he’s used to, but she still commands the room (even his living room) with a power that is more plain personality than her designation.

“Ah, Benjamin,” his mother says, removing her sunglasses with a _click_ as she kicks the door shut. She pins him with a piercing stare from across the room, looking him up and down, taking in his unkempt hair and old clothes. Ben has the strange feeling that that stare could strip the tendons from his bones. 

She doesn’t miss a thing. She never has. 

When he was younger, his mother’s myriad looks drove him up the wall. It only took the slightest smile, the twitch of a brow, for him to bristle like a dog on edge. Now, he doesn’t mind having at least one person in the world who can take one look at him and see him down to the marrow. Who knows the words to his story better than he does.

Leia turns her attention elsewhere, taking in the bare walls, the stacked boxes, his monster of a leather couch. Her wild tree of a son covered in cat. The only kitchen appliance he’d unpacked so far, and the most necessary: his overpriced coffee maker. 

“Interesting choice, as usual. Is it all one room?” Leia turns to narrow her eyes at the lofted bedroom and his messy mattress.

“Mm hmm,” Ben grunts.

“So this is the only tour I’ll be getting, I assume.”

“Mm hmm, “ he repeats, running a hand over his face. It may be 10am, but he doesn’t have the brain cells to play mental chess with his mother at the moment.

Leia sighs.

“I can’t believe what you named that poor animal,” she bulldozes right through his tired answers as she kicks off her pumps and sets her briefcase down beside the door. All business as usual, she briskly crosses the carpet to Ben and wakes Punisher with a single soft rub between the ears.

“Hey,” Ben mutters in protest, as the approximately five pound cat (who _still_ manages a valiant attempt at crushing his windpipe while he’s sleeping), is lifted from his collarbone and tucked tight to his mother’s chest. Her undoubtedly expensive business suit will be covered with fur in the next few minutes, but she’d always had cats when he was growing up, and Ben knows she won’t mind.

Pun doesn’t wiggle, doesn’t even move in her arms, just nudges his mother’s chin with the top of her silken little head.

Leia carries the cat to the little kitchen, dodging boxes and the sharp edge of the coffee table on her way. 

“Benjamin,” she says over her shoulder, as she places Punisher in her cat tree beside the counter. Pun needles the dark carpeting at the top of the tree for a few seconds and then plops down on it, rolling onto her back. Ben can’t help but smile. “Why don’t you go take a shower and get into some clean clothes. I’ll make you something to eat, but you need to bathe. You smell like a wet dog.”

Ben snorts, finally able to push himself off the chair without getting clawed to death by his cat or god forbid, waking her in the first place. She only falls asleep on his chest when she _just knows_ he needs to get up, after all. He pads to the bathroom crowded with boxes, raising his long arms to brush the ceiling of the short hallway as he goes, leaning from side to side to hear his neck and back pop.

“Thanks ma,” he calls over his shoulder with only the barest hint of sarcasm. He hears Leia mutter something about the bare fridge shelves before he shuts the bathroom door and he lets himself smile again, feels only the slightest twinge of sadness. It’s been a long time since his mother made him breakfast, since he allowed her to. 

But Ben knows she’ll have a full grocery list, organized by supermarket section, ready for him in the fifteen minutes it takes for him to shower and change.

“You’re welcome dear,” she calls back. He can already hear the scraping of a pen.

****

_Snoke had been a voice inside his head since he was thirteen. Even now, seventeen years later and dead as any ghost, Ben can still hear him as if he were folded into one of his armchairs, one spindly leg crossed over the other, his thin hair combed tight across his skull, piercing Ben with a gaze like a gunshot._

_“I’ve been reviewing the code since last night,” he’d say, a smile more cruel than amused curling his mouth like the stroke of a comma across a page. ‘Don’t you want power, boy?’ that smile seems to ask. ‘You could be so much more than this amateur, than some child coasting through a college class making petty video games.’_

_“Sloppy. Messy. You can do better than this, Kylo Ren. You--”_

“You’re brooding again,” his mother says, not looking up from the list she’s, surprisingly, still crafting. She’d always had the talent of tapping into his emotions from across a room, or even more disturbing, from several states away. When Ben was small, it comforted him. When he was a teenager, caught between feeling too much and wanting to feel too little, it enraged him.

When he was a young man looking for a way out, it saved him.

Now? Ben shrugs, a smile playing around his lips. “Don’t you know?” his reply is flippant. He scoops a mouthful of the scrambled eggs Leia made him into his mouth, pausing briefly to chew, swallow. “It’s my default setting.”

( _“You’re more and more like Han every day,”_ Leia used to say, her voice laced with pride, over the phone in the years between Snoke and New York. And Snoke, whenever he used to make a joke, or smile, show he felt human emotion, that he was more than an Alpha who could code: _“You have too much of your father’s heart in you…”_ ) 

Leia scoffs, flipping to a new page in her legal pad and starting a new list with swift strokes of a red pen. “Don’t I.”

Ben chuckles, and it’s like they have an inside joke just between the two of them, instead of a history of hurt and anguish. In the past six years, Ben has done his best to make up his high school and college years to his mother, despite her reassurance that most teenagers are demons and she’d expected nothing less with a Skywalker Solo child in the house.

Back in New York, the yawning chasm of _years_ , of lost birthdays and Mother’s Days, of missing his mother grow old, his father’s face descend into a mass of wrinkles, used to threaten to drown him.

His therapist in Manhattan had told him five years ago, peering over her gold spectacles at him just like Leia always did, her expression just as thoughtfully stern, “I understand it was hard, Ben, having parents who didn’t always seem to have enough time for you. What you need to realize though, is that from what you’ve described here, they seemed to love you very much. And it looks like, to me, that your distance from them is tearing you apart.”

He’d cursed how easily Dr. Connix read him, but realized she was right.

Leia and Ben share one last look, laced with nothing but a sweet cocktail of relief and love deeper than Ben had ever felt or understood in his life before his mother had called him out of the blue six years ago. Leia’s eyes crinkle at the corners, showing crows feet now but no less affectionate or beautiful, as she smiles at him. 

Then, she returns to her papers, and he to his eggs.

****

Leia takes him shopping later, insisting he needs to eat more and eat real meals for once. A member of her security team is waiting by the side entrance to the apartment building, dressed in jeans and a pastel peach golf shirt like a dad from an 80s vacation film. You can’t even see his ear piece, but his military haircut and dark sunglasses scream security.

When his mother briefly introduces the two in the back of her town car, Ben smirks as he grips the other man’s hand. “Hey there Clark,” he says, already forgetting the guard’s real name. What was it, Gerry? “How’s Ellen?”

His mother levels him with _that look_ , the one he’d know better than the backs of his hands, the intricacies of Javascript. “Benjamin,” she says drolly. “Play nice. Don’t make Gary shoot you.”

Ah, so it was Gary then.

****

When Leia drops him off hours later, the back of the town car laden with grocery bags and reusable sacks bearing produce from the local farmers market, Ben assures her he can handle the total of sixteen bags himself. 

If the other Alphas he’d gone to high school with were to be believed, he _did_ have the arms of an orangutan. 

His mother gives him another of her million looks (she has the most expressive face Ben’s ever seen), and then shrugs, folding him into her warm arms before he can gather up the bags. 

Ben allows himself one moment to breathe his mother in as he leans almost in half to return the gesture. He is no longer a grouchy teen determined to deny any affection, to believe his parents think he’s dog shit, a talentless hack. He knows now, with no doubt in his mind, that his mother thinks the world of him. That his father, despite the generational gap, the clumsy attempts at bonding, loves him more than he loves jet engines, than he loves the way the sky looks with only clouds and a copilot for company.

And Leia, despite six months of not seeing each other, despite the years, _the wasted years,_ still smells as she always has: faintly of ink, brisk winter air, and Chanel No 5, with just the slightest hint of Alpha beneath the cologne. Like childhood embraces, like pure, heady comfort. Like his _mother_.

Without the presence of silver strung through her dark hair or the smallest wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, bracketing her mouth, Ben wouldn’t believe time has passed at all.

She and...Gary? Gary -- help Ben pile the bags by the side entrance of his apartment building, and she pats him one more time on the cheek, promising she’ll see him again tomorrow, same time, to go over the pull reports for Resistance Tech, before she climbs back into the town car with her guard. 

Ben watches the pale cream Lincoln pull slowly away, the window cracked so his mother can wave to him, and stays there, leaning against the exposed brick wall, long after the car’s accelerated out into traffic and disappeared. He threads his hands through his dark hair, long enough to touch the collar of his black t-shirt now ( _how on brand,_ he thinks). Not for the first time in the last few years since he kicked the habit, he craves a cigarette.

It takes him two trips to get all of the bags into the apartment, and much longer to move them to the kitchen with Pun weaving between his legs as he struggles not to knock over piles of stacked boxes. 

“Hey,” Ben says between the first trip and the last, as the cat stops right where he’s stepping and looks up at him calmly, expectantly, with complete trust. God, he loves her, despite her attempts to _murder him_ every single day. “You mind not stopping right in the way, Pun? You wanna die or something?”

She just mews in response, rubbing against his boot.

Ben sighs, leaning down to rub her ears, to stroke her long, slender body before heading for the door. Cats, really.

It’s after he thunders down the stairs and kicks open the side entrance door, flinging his hair out of his face so he can lean down and actually see what he’s grabbing that he finally smells it.

He freezes, like a wolf spotting a deer before the hunt begins, bent in half over his Fred Meyer bags, his arms reaching out to nothing. The scent hits him like an uppercut to the face, and he almost falls on his ass onto the damp concrete sidewalk. 

It’s _warm_ , so warm it fills his stomach with butterflies. Like summer. Oregon and Virginia in July, beaches spread with pale sand as far as the eye can see, the Pacific as iron gray as the perpetual cloud cover, the Atlantic a murky but comforting gray-green tangled with seaweed and driftwood. It’s like beach grass and daisies plucked from the side of the road, like the scent of sun-soaked blacktop and the sound of a basketball swishing through a net. Like ocean salt and sunscreen spread in thick layers down his arms while he tries valiantly to wiggle away from his mother.

_And he is six again, in Virginia Beach, helping his grinning father and uncle spread a huge plaid picnic blanket across the sand. Luke and Han are in t-shirts and swim trunks, feet bare, and Ben’s mother is in a 1950s style garnet red one-piece, a sarong tied about her waist, her hair still perfectly braided in a band across her scalp. Not a single strand is out of place. She’s smiling as Han takes one end of the blanket and Luke the other._

_“Come on Ben, grab an end!” Han calls, the soft July breeze bristling his hair. He is younger, almost carefree, and the smile he sends Ben’s mother is no-holds-barred, something Ben won’t understand until decades later._

_Ben grabs an end and almost tangles himself in it as all three Skywalker-Solo males drag the blanket in opposite directions, fighting with the breeze._

_Finally, after several minutes trying to lay the thing perfectly, Han and Luke mark their ends with large stones and Han lopes over to his son, his grin so beautiful it hurts Ben’s chest, pulls at the ventricles of his heart. “You did good, kid,” Han says, reaching out to ruffle Ben’s hair. “I’m proud of you.”_

_Ben is six, and the hand on his head, gently moving through his thick hair, the easy words, make shivers of happiness run up and down his bare back. He wants to soak up his father’s happiness like he would savor the taste of ice cream. He grins back at his father, and their eyes meet briefly, molten brown to molten brown, before Han bends and scoops Ben up around the stomach, heading off down the beach with him. They laugh and yell to each other, and it is, without a doubt, the best day of six year old Ben Solo’s life._

Ben comes back to himself to find he is squatting now, his elbows leaning on his knees, tears in his eyes. A weight is lodged in his chest and that warm beautiful scent is stuck in his nostrils, on his tongue. _God_ , he’d nearly forgotten about that day, so long ago. And the following moments, where Han taught him how to fly a kite after lifting Ben over his head and running down the beach with him, making fighter plane noises. _Pew pew pew_.

 _“Look at it go, kid,”_ Han had said, and the grin he normally reserves for Chewie, for Ben’s mother, is aimed at him now. He feels like a spotlight is shining on him. Like he and his father are the only two figures alone on the vast expanse of white sand. _“You made it fly.”_

 _“One day, dada,”_ Ben replied in a wild yell against the breeze-turned-wind, _“I’ll make anything fly, just like you!”_

Ben takes a deep, heaving breath and finally looks up, willing the tears back from the corners of his eyes. He runs a trembling hand through his hair and searches the courtyard, trying to find the culprit behind that unthinkable, incapacitating, _heartbreaking_ scent.

It takes two tries to find her, and when he does, Ben feels like a horse has just kicked him in the chest. She’s small, thin and waiflike, with chestnut hair half-hidden under a maroon beanie. She’s leaning against the window next to the doors of the building across the courtyard, looking down at her phone. He can’t quite make out the color of her eyes, but he can see faint freckles dotting her golden skin, skipping across her pert little nose and down her neck.

It’s windy, the omnipresent rain about to hit again, and her scent is wafting across the courtyard to him in waves. He stares at her for longer than he should, breathing in gulps of sunshine and sunscreen and summer like a starving man. She’s like an answered prayer standing there in a shabby, oversized, sheepskin-lined jean jacket that nearly engulfs her, earbuds tucked into her ears, bopping her head to something he can’t hear.

 _What music do you like?_ Ben wonders, thinking briefly of the record collection upstairs, the boxes upon boxes he’d saved from his parents’ basement as a teen, the hours he spent locked in his room with his record player. They could talk about them, he could ask who her favorite guitarist is, if she understands the difference between synthwave and synthpop because he might be just a bit too old... _Who are you, you beautiful girl?_

He watches her and watches her, ignoring the aches in his thighs from the long squat, the melting ice cream and frozen broccoli at his feet. She is everything to him, his vision has narrowed to encompass her and nothing else. All he knows is that she _must_ be an Omega, and that she smells better than anything or anyone he’s ever known.

Only when she tucks her phone into her jacket pocket and swings the door open, practically skipping to the elevator in her ballet flats, is he able to stop staring. He remembers then, when he’d been a strange, romantic eight year old and asked his mother how it had felt to meet his father for the first time.

 _“Well, Ben,”_ Leia had said, considering him with a smile full of wicked, clever humor. _“It felt like lightning would, I suppose. Before it kills you.”_

Ben unfolds himself to his full height, his joints creaking, and gathers up the rest of his groceries on one long arm. As he hops up the cement steps to his apartment, he can still smell the barest hint of her on the breeze.

 _Before it kills you_ , he thinks, kicking open his door. _Hmm._


	6. and understand the message: i have

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey goes through a reactive heat with highly questionable drugs and I have no clue what I'm doing wooo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TY again for all of your amazing feedback!!! Your comments make me cry ;__;

_ _

_ I was— am— terrified of being owned. By a god or a man or a child or a place. By anyone or anything but myself. _

\- Brenna Womer, “Empire Blue," _ Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance _

Rey woke before sunrise, just as the sky was still teeming with the gentle light of dimmed stars. It was a clear night for once, and she could see them spread out across a patch of darkness just between the crack in her curtains. She hadn’t been dreaming, but she felt hot all over despite having kicked off her covers hours before.

Even her hair was sweaty, pasted to her face and neck. Her scent gland was throbbing.

She lay still on her pillow top mattress, staring up at the dark ceiling in misery. In this hazy moment between the lovely oblivion of sleep and the miasma of wakefulness, she had no memory of the text conversations from the night before, the electric moment of eye contact, the note written in calligraphy taped to  _ his _ window. All Rey knew was that her throat was dry and her neck was flushed and aching.

Overheating during a 25 degree winter night was nearly impossible, even with the radiator on blast. Her weather app had been threatening “wintry mix,” aka “rain that just hits your face harder than usual” the day before.

_ Maybe the flu? _

Then, it dawned on her in a sudden flood of consciousness:

_ Preheat. _

Rolling over was painful, her joints felt like hinges gone without oil for too long. Rey snatched up her cell phone from its charging port in the dark from touch alone and groaned as the bright light hit her directly in the eyes.

4:31am, her iphone’s clock mocked her.

Ugh.

Squinting, she scrolled through to the Alpha’s messages and flopped back onto the bed, the linens damp from her perspiration. 

_ You smell like every good memory I’ve ever had. _

God. Could she have gone into heat from reading that one sentence? Or had it been that moment in the courtyard, or the second she caught his scent for the first time?

There were four more messages waiting from  _ him _ , nothing from Finn after he passed out at 10pm the night before. Rey rubbed her eyes in frustration, her entire body feeling like it had been run over by a dump truck or something equally dramatic. She was squinting again, curious despite her exhausted non-Omega brain positively yelling to  _ end it now. Hurry, before he makes you his, before he bties you and can take whatever he wants. You know all Alphas are the same. _

**503-555-9696 timestamped 12:25am:** I just realized I forgot to answer your other two questions, Rey. My apologies. My full name is Ben Solo, and I’ve attached a link to my only social media. I swear, I don’t have instagram or facebook. It’s bad enough interacting with other humans in person, let alone every dickhead with an opinion on the bowels of the internet.

Rey snorted, and even that hurt. She felt that statement on a personal level. She only had facebook for Poe and Finn, who posted entire albums of pictures whenever they went on a trip...or a regular date.

**503-555-9696 timestamped 12:30am:** I’m going to head to bed. Message me anytime you want to talk. Goodnight Rey, sleep well.

_ God _ . Rey set her phone down on her bare stomach, covered her face with her hands so she wouldn’t bother her neighbors, and  _ groaned _ . Why did this Alpha have to be so  _ nice _ , dammit? Why did her body have to feel like it was falling apart hours after seeing him across a freaking courtyard?

_ Please _ , that tiny, entirely too unwelcome Omega section of her brain whispered.  _ Please don’t leave us alone. _

“Please don’t start,” Rey found herself groaning, rubbing her tender forehead with the heels of her hands. The sound was harsh in the pre-dawn silence of her room. Thank God her walls weren’t thinner. Her neighbors already thought she was weird enough. 

The feeling in her gut, the aches and pains, the lack of dreams, certainly felt like preheat, but she wasn’t due for another two months. Either it was the most unwelcome fuck up of her cycle ever, or she’d caught some plague from touching something on the train, which was possible.

But even a flu didn’t feel like this. Rey’s thighs weren’t just damp from sweat, they were soaked with a thick, embarrassingly familiar fluid. Her small breasts were heavy and sore, and she felt this...bone-deep sense of loss, of emptiness, that didn’t come when she was sick. Abject misery did, of course, but a fever didn’t make her cunt flutter.

_ Goddammit.  _

Rey had spent the last hour or so of her shift a sobbing mess after that  _ life-changing _ message, and now she knew why. The words, yes, the feelings, of course, but it had also been preheat. 

Fucking  _ preheat _ . Preheat had made her go to the laundromat yesterday, not actual productivity. She’d been  _ nesting _ .

How she hadn’t drawn the attention of every unmated Alpha on Portland’s public transit the past few days was a mystery. 

“Mother fucker,” Rey grumbled, grabbing her phone off her belly and hauling herself up off her mattress so she could stumble, tripping over what was undoubtedly a pair of dirty underwear thrown on the floor, for her lamp. It took her several tries to turn it on with her sweaty, trembling fingers, but finally the room was bathed in soft gold light. She could now see the pile of clothes she’d left on the floor earlier that night, the tangled wet mess of her blankets. Thankfully, she was wise enough to keep a heat-proof mattress pad down at all times so her expensive bed wasn’t ruined. But regardless, how could this happen? She hadn’t even touched this Alpha.

Rey had heard of reactive heats. They were why most workplaces kept the designations separate, but she’d assumed from the little information she’d read that reactive heats occurred after prolonged contact with an Alpha, a particularly compatible Alpha, not  _ two freaking seconds _ .

Panic roared up in her empty stomach, twisting her insides. She held up her phone and did, in her hazy exhausted mind, the only thing there was to do. 

She called Finn.

It rang four times before a raspy voice answered. By then, Rey’s entire body was shaking with fear and stress. She stood hunched over her bent knees, one arm wrapped around her stomach, trying to breathe as her uterus suddenly contracted. The cramps were coming now. She’d barely even had warning. 

Tears made a slow journey down the sides of her cheeks. Her mind, the last logical portion left before the Omega fully took over, was chanting  _ how how how how how how how????? _

“R-Rey? Whazzup it’s 4am-”

“Finn,” Rey burst out. “Finn oh my god, I need you to help me.”

It was as if she’d flipped a switch.

“Rey honey,” Finn’s voice was soft and firm all at once, no longer rough with sleep. “What’s going on? I’m waking Poe up, tell me where you are. Are you safe?”

She heard a muffled groan in the background that was undoubtedly a very grumpy Poe being woken out of a dead sleep, but Rey couldn’t even start the process of caring. She needed  _ someone _ . She needed Finn.

Despite the lack of any stimulation, more slick soaked her cotton underwear, slipping out of her like she’d just gotten her period and happened to sneeze. Rey clenched her legs together and gave a pitiful groan.

“I’m in h-heat, Finn.” she whispered. “I’m in fucking heat and I don’t know how! I-I-It’s not due for two months! I haven’t even touched anyone. I haven’t-”

Finn’s gusty sigh was the only sound Rey could hear outside of her own sharp panting. “Are you at home, Peanut?” he asked. “We’re getting dressed and coming to you.”

_ Thank god, _ Rey thought, her eyes instantly brimming with more tears.  _ Please. I don’t want to be alone _ . She began to cry in earnest as another cramp made her knees turn to jelly.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Please Finny, please help me.”

She’d never begged Finn for anything before. Not once when they were children, not even when she’d pulled him back from leaving the closet that one time, when the Alphas were ripping down their foster mother’s door.

He was resolute in his reply.

“I’ll be there honey. I promise. I’m coming. You’re going to be okay.”

**

Finn and Poe kept Rey talking during the entire fifteen minute drive to her apartment in Southeast, taking turns when necessary. Rey had fallen to the floor at some point during those fifteen minutes from the force of the cramps and had to crawl, her knees burning on the hardwood, her phone gripped between her cheek and shoulder, back to her bed. She’d collapsed on her side and was now crying in earnest, her breath coming in heavy sobs as Poe whispered in her ear.

“Rey baby,” he said in low, calm tones. “We’ve got two more minutes until we’re there. You’re safe, no one’s gonna hurt you okay? It’s just hormones, just nature. We love you. Just stay with us.” 

She could hear the Alpha command in his voice, but it did nothing for her. Of course it wouldn’t. He was her friend, he was mated, she felt as much attraction to Poe as she would a tree. But also, her core was craving a completely different voice, a different Alpha.

Molten dark eyes, thick wavy hair. Back muscles.  _ Back. Muscles. _

_ God. _

Rey felt nothing but emptiness, her own loneliness magnified back to her a thousand times over. She hugged her knees to her chest, her sleep shorts now soaked with slick, and wept so hard her throat ached. 

She’d cried so much in the past week, nearly every day at her desk or in her bed before sleep took her. She was surprised she still had tears left.

_ It’s just nature.  _ The words from that Omega-centered meditation process flooded her terrified mind:  _ I am more than my designation. I am human.  _ Was she really? Was she more than an Omega, a creature made entirely of desperate, clawing want?

“P-Please,” she whispered into the phone, and she had never felt so low, so horrid in her life. Even during her first heat, it wasn’t like this. She’d had warning, prep time, and for every heat after, medication. She didn’t even think she had any emergency suppressants left.  _ God _ . “Poe.”

“I know, honey,” Poe said, and she could hear the screech of their old Nissan’s breaks. She really needed to take a look at them again, use the few skills her one foster father had instilled in her...or well, skills she’d instilled in herself in his “care.” A muffled bark sounded in the background, and Finn saying, “shh Beebee, shh!”

They kept her on the phone still, even as she could distantly hear their feet clattering up the metal staircase to her apartment, both of them close to the speaker, telling her it was all going to be okay. A key slid into her lock, little dog claws scrabbled at the wood of her door, and it burst open, bringing a rush of relieving cold air with it.

Rey felt Beebee first, before she saw either of her friends. The chubby corgi raced for her across the carpet despite his fathers’ twin cries of “no Beebee!” Her bed tilted a bit with his weight and then he was cleaning her tear-streaked, sweat-soaked face with soft licks of his tongue. 

A fresh wave of tears overcame her at the contact, and she unlatched her numb hands from around her knees to hug Beebee to her chest, burying her face in his thick, soft fur. Normally, she would laugh and push him away after a few seconds of tongue action, but tonight she could barely feel it, she just knew she wasn’t alone anymore.

“Oh man,” Poe said over her sobs. Rey peeked over Beebees shoulder as he licked her ear. Poe stood just beside the bed with his hands on his hips, still dressed in his Spongebob pajama pants and an inside out rain jacket as he surveyed the scene. Behind him, Finn was already picking up her clothes and tossing them into her laundry basket, wearing the Squidward pants from their Holiday Pajama Exchange last year. Rey couldn’t even bring herself to feel embarrassed when he grabbed a cardigan and the pair of underwear she’d tripped over earlier.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Finn.”

**

Between Poe, Finn, and an eager Beebee at their heels, Rey was able to be half-supported, half-carried into her bathroom. If Poe or Finn could smell her sweat or worse, her slick, they didn’t comment, and their expressions of concern didn’t change.

Poe flicked on the lights and she flinched, burying her face in Finn’s gray sleepshirt. 

“Okay,” Poe said, lightly clapping his hands so he didn’t startle her further. “Finn, let’s get Rey out of these clothes and into the bath.” He stepped up to Finn, placing a hand on his back. 

“Rey-”

“I got it babe,” Finn said. Through her tear-streaked vision, Rey could see the sadness in her best friend’s warm eyes, the soft way he looked at her as if he were holding something precious in his arms. He was more like a brother than a friend, always had been.

Poe patted his husband’s shoulder and withdrew, leaving the two alone in the drafty little bathroom with the barely working toilet, Rey’s few cosmetics and even fewer face products crowding the little counter with its cracked sink and too-large mirror, and her faded Tardis shower curtain. 

Finn slowly, slowly set Rey down. She let out a little sigh at the feeling of ice cold tile under her hot, sweaty feet.

“Rey,” Finn murmured, placing his hands on her shoulders to support her. A little rolling cramp hit her stomach then, and she winced, but Finn held her through it, rubbing circles across her freckled shoulders with his thumbs. “Rey hon, I need to take your clothes off and run a bath for you. Is that okay? Can I take them off, or can you?”

“I-” Rey stammered. Her throat was so dry that even muttering a syllable hurt. “I can do it.”

She couldn’t bear anyone else’s hands sliding under her clothes, even if they were friendly and clinical and not at all sexual. 

_ Alpha _ , that thoroughly annoying voice whined in the back of Rey’s mind.  _ Need Alpha. _

Rey knew her full heat was only a day or so away, so she still had the control left to think up a denial. Not for the first time, she was reminded of the movie scenes with devils and angels sitting on protagonists’ shoulders. Her constant battle with her Omega couldn’t be better represented. 

_ Rey, _ the voice whispered, as if they were two separate entities.  _ He’ll be so good to us. He’ll take care of us. He wrote us notes, he talks to us. Please R- _

**_SHUT UP YOU USELESS REPTILE!_ **

Finn nodded, blissfully unaware of her inner battle, and Rey knew he understood nonetheless. His preheats were particularly difficult, worse than the actual thing. His nesting habits took over for an entire week, and he’d call Rey nearly every day, crying softly into the phone from restlessness and nightmares.

If anyone knew what it was like to cringe away from gentle hands, it would be Finn. 

He patted her over-warm shoulder just once before withdrawing, his hand roughly-callused but cool. Swinging the plastic Tardis curtain over the edge of the tub, he took down two of the holey bralettes she’d hung from the showerhead today after doing laundry, setting them on the back of the toilet. Rey couldn’t even feel embarrassed. They’d grown up together, he’d seen her during her first period, helped her Google how to put a tampon in. He could handle a bra.

As Finn bent to fiddle with the temperature knobs, she wrapped her arms around herself, leaning up against the cool counter so she wouldn’t fall. Her legs felt like rubber. She closed her eyes, focusing on the sudden darkness behind her lids instead of the incessant clamoring of the voice, the compulsions, that felt like little battering rams slamming against her skull. 

Soon, Rey knew, she would be nothing  _ but _ compulsion. The voice would take over, the instincts, stripping away all clarity, all rational thought, any bodily autonomy she thought she had. It was a visceral terror. 

To some, heat was a comfort, a release. To Rey, it was a threat. A threat of vulnerability, a threat of assault if an Alpha smelled you unclaimed and came to find you, a threat of four days of _nothing_ _but desire_. No hunger, no thirst. 

Rey had only ever had one heat without the assistance of medical intervention. She’d pissed herself, wet the sheets with slick and urine and hadn’t even cared, just kept going until her  _ rechargeable  _ vibrator died. And even then, it hadn’t been enough. Orgasm after orgasm until her clitoris felt like it was going to shrivel up and fall off. Nothing could fill the void.

Heat was  _ horrible _ , no matter how positively mated pairs, school sex ed programs, or doctors tried to spin it. And if her utter asshole of a lizard brain was taking over this quickly, if she was going into heat from such a brief contact, she’d need to refill her emergency suppressants as soon as possible before she turned into a sex zombie.

Or you know, a  _ masturbation zombie _ . Same difference.

“Okay,” Finn said, his voice cutting through her anxious thoughts. “All good, should be warm enough.” The water turned off and Rey’s eyes flew open at the sudden silence. She stepped to the tub on trembling legs, the linoleum like ice under feet, and Finn covered his eyes without her even having to ask.

Rey shed her sleep shirt, her shorts, and her ruined underwear (of course, a fairly new pair) and put them on the closed toilet seat in a pile before leaning over to run her hands through the bath water. Finn hadn’t added any bubbles or the piece of bath bomb she still had in a case on the soap shelf, because the last thing she needed was a yeast infection during a heat, so the water was beautifully hot and clear. 

Finn fully turned his back and Rey stepped one foot, then the next into the water. Gooseflesh rose on her calves, forearms, and the skin around her mating gland as she sat down in a scrunch, holding her knees to her chest and allowing herself to get used to the warmth. Despite the sweat still trickling down her spine and building under her arms, the steaming heat of the bath was comforting. Her tense joints and muscles finally began to relax, and Rey let her eyes fall shut, her cheek set against her folded arms, letting the water lap at her skin and ease the swelling in her cunt.

“Reyrey,” Finn said quietly. “Do you want us to call the clinic when it opens?”

Of course he’d know. He’d gone through plenty of dry heats before meeting Poe. 

Rey didn’t open her eyes. She gave the barest of nods, and heard the door open briefly, and then shut.

She was alone.

**

Hours passed with Rey in the tub, steaming like a lobster. She refilled the water at intervals, whenever the temperature lowered just a degree or so below boiling. The heat helped the cramping at her core, the tension in her legs and abdomen. She spread her legs to let the water fully caress her core, her tingling labia. She finally felt languid and conscious floating there, all anxiety drifting away. 

Sometimes this would happen, an hour or so of calm before the churning storm, and it was probably why Finn had immediately put her in the tub. Her mind, for once, was quiet.

It was so wonderful, she ended up laying sprawled with the water up to her neck with her gland fully submerged, her hair drifting about her face like seaweed.

Poe called the clinic at exactly 7am, the instant their phone lines opened, and Rey’s doctor responded with an emergency refill of her suppressant pens. He raced off with BeeBee forty five minutes later to pick them up at the pharmacy, returning with a full trunk of groceries and an approved PTO request from Holdo herself. Rey nearly cried with relief when he told her. She had been dreading the call to HR.

Finn brought Rey a bowl of cereal an hour into her bath, then her phone once she’d choked down the small bowl of crispy cocoa rice with almond milk and a glass of cool water, the grains tasting like dust in her mouth. He only handed it over, knowing how shakey an Omega could be before their heat, when Rey assured him several times she felt calm enough, steady enough not to drop it in the water. 

He was wise enough to stay silent as he handed the phone over. He hadn’t brought up the subject of the Alpha once since he’d arrived at nearly 5am, and Rey hoped he wouldn’t until the heat had run its course. He could interrogate her fully after her hormones had drained away.

Speak of the devil...Rey spent so long staring at the messages from the Alpha...Ben Solo, he’d written, that they were practically ingrained in her mind. She laid on her side, hip firmly planted on the warm bottom of the tub, leaning over the rim with her soaking hair draped over her shoulder like a landed mermaid just to read them, again and again. 

Rey spent long minutes idly scrolling through his linkedin, the professional pictures of him with shorter, more coiffed hair, dressed in a suit jacket and black t-shirt. His massive hands were in the picture, folded on his knees while sitting, hanging at his sides as he stood against a black backdrop. They were huge even on her tiny phone screen, with long, thick fingers and defined veins. Her pulse thrummed at the sight of him, the small quirk of a smile playing with his mouth, the mental image of those hands touching her face, reaching for her. 

He was a security analyst, as he’d told her, and currently freelancing. His resume was extensive, one long page of various tech startups and projects, including a Ted Talk she couldn’t bring herself to click on entitled  _ The Intersection Between Politics and Hacking.  _ It would be torture to hear his voice, watch him move. 

And she didn’t snoop. Well, didn’t snoop  _ much. _

...Who was she kidding, she lived to snoop.

Rey herself was an engineer who couldn’t get a job in her field thanks, in her mind, to a wonderful little thing called  _ being poor _ . She’d spent too many years in college working to survive and hadn’t had the time nor luxury to intern, apprentice, or network. Post-grad jobs depended on who you knew more than your skillset or GPA. She’d applied for so many after Stanford, hoping her grades and her passion, her skills alone would shine through over her experience. But she’d never made it past a resume review, or once, an initial interview. She had since stopped applying.

But of course, because life loved mocking her, Ben Solo was a pioneer in  _ his _ field. A Computer Science Bachelors from MIT, a Masters in the same from Cornell. Several IT, Security, and Programming certificates and licenses. He’d even taught intro level coding and programming courses at a few New York State community colleges and one SUNY campus. And even worse: he had over 800 connections, one of whom was Leia Organa, an Oregon Senator.

_ Jesus _ . Rey quickly exited out of her linkedin app, refusing to let the anxiety bubble up again, or the all-too-familiar feeling of inadequacy that had plagued her throughout her school years when she’d had to wait tables or deliver food while her classmates interned at Google. It wasn’t her fault she was stuck in customer service while a man like this made Ted Talks and got to work from home. It was a damn recession. And besides, based on his graduation year, he had a good eight years on her that probably hadn’t involved a layoff when the economy tanked. 

After thoroughly memorizing his resume, Rey spent long minutes staring at her texting app, not knowing what to type. She didn’t know how to tell him it would be days before she could even think about talking with him again or going to work. She couldn’t tell him she was in Heat, let alone a reactive Heat to  _ his presence _ , but with her anxiety gone, her Omega taking a damned break, she wanted to tell him something at least. For the $35 background check she hadn’t bothered looking through yet, she told herself. For the effort  _ he _ had made. 

Droplets of water  _ drip drip dripped  _ down her cracked phone screen as she typed with steady, determined fingers:

**_Rey:_ ** _ Hi Ben, it’s nice to meet you :) Over text message, at least. I don’t remember if I’ve told you, but my name is Rey Niima. Thank you for the background check, the links, and the thorough answers to my questions. I should probably tell you a bit more about myself after all that. I’m 23, I graduated from Stanford a few years ago with a degree in mechanical engineering. I’ve never been mated, I’m single, I’m on a high dose of suppressants and emergency suppressants as well because I don’t actually date. I was raised in foster care.  _

_ And I wanted you to know: it would be nice to talk with you here, but if you don’t hear from me for a few days, I’m actually pretty sick right now, so I might not be on my phone much. Hope you’re having a great day and thanks again. _

There. Maybe the part about not dating would discourage him. She didn’t know whether the thought filled her with relief or disappointment.

A gentle knock sounded on the bathroom door and Rey nearly dropped her phone in the bath. 

She slammed the little blue arrow to send the message before she could reread it or overthink, and set the phone down on the stained linoleum floor.

“Rey Rey?” Finn asked, cracking the door open and peering through the gap. The lack of BeeBee’s presence at his feet, pushing the door open with his bulk, was telling. Poe probably dropped him by their place on his way back from Walmart, or leashed him in the living room. “Poe prepped the ES. Want the dosage now, or after lunch?”

Oblivion now or oblivion later, when the cramps and desperate yearning for an otherwise useless knotted penis could return? Definitely now.

“Now’s fine,” Rey rasped.

“Kay, don’t blame you,” Finn smiled. “I’ll get Poe, we can do it together if you want?”

“Sure.” Both Finn and Rey had stabbed each other with an ES before. It took too much effort to do by yourself, unless you wanted a serious injury.

Finn disappeared from view for a moment, and then Rey heard the  _ slap slap _ of Poe’s bare feet on the carpeting. A moment later, a burst of cold air flooded the bathroom as the door was pushed wide open. 

Poe had his maroon henley unbuttoned, sleeves shoved up over his forearms. His hair was damp from the inevitable Portland rain and pushed back from his face in a mess of espresso-colored curls. He grinned at Rey when his eyes found her huddled in the tub, but lines of exhaustion were etched into the corners of his mouth. “Hey there trooper,” he said, his voice slightly hoarse. “You ready to get stabbed with a needle?”

Rey didn’t mind needles. From the first draw at six, when her blood was taken to determine her designation, to her last physical exam, she’d been pricked with too many to count. 

“Let’s do this,” she said.

Finn entered behind Poe, his hand on the small of his mate’s muscular back. Rey couldn’t help but feel guilty at how tired they both looked, especially after a week of Finn’s own heat and the undoubtedly sleepless nights. 

“Ready to pass out?” he asked, laying a hand towel out on the counter and unpacking the pack of emergency suppressant pens from the pharmacy bag. Poe had already unloaded a pen from its plastic container and pressed the purple activation button at the top. The thick white applicator stuck out of the bottom of the pen, revealing the sharp edge of the needle that would be piercing the skin of Rey’s thigh shortly. 

She responded with a smile that was more a tremble than anything else. “Th-thank you two. For coming so fast, for getting me food and the drugs. For everything.”

Finn’s brow furrowed in concern, but Poe looked up from the suppressant pen to give Rey a brilliant grin, all straight white teeth, like a toothpaste ad.

“We love you, honey. You know that. We’re always going to be here.”

Finn clapped his husband on the shoulder, and the look in his eyes almost made Rey cry again. “Can’t get rid of us.”

Smiling fully now, Rey rose from the tub in a shower of droplets and shivered in the now frigid air. Poe handed her a threadbare towel from the hook on the back of the door and she wrapped herself up, making sure to dry off her right thigh before she took a seat on the rim of the tub. She couldn’t handle the contact now, but after her heat, she’d be strangling them both with hugs.

Everything was so much colder and hazier now, and she could feel her headache returning. The heat of the water had kept the aches away and she’d barely noticed how swollen her gland was as she reclined in the bath, but now that it was exposed to the air, it felt too hot and too tight. 

Finn and Poe squatted in front of her, both trying to smile despite the exhaustion. Finn took Rey’s hand, his grip warm and dry and the most like home she had ever known. Poe grasped the pen in one hand, his other reaching to steady her thigh. 

“Okay Rey honey,” he said, all Alpha command laced with affection. “Gonna count to two.”

Rey’s head bobbed in a nod.  _ Get it over with, _ she thought.  _ Please. _

The high dose of suppressants would have her knocked out and completely delirious in a matter of ten minutes, and she couldn’t wait. She’d rather go through three days of fever dreams and the occasional hallucination than the horror of an actual heat.

“One,” Poe said, his hand practically encompassing her entire thigh. 

Then, with some trepidation: “One and a half.”

“Poe!” Rey and Finn snapped together, and he had the grace to look sheepish.

“Fine fine, sorry. Two!”

“And...now!”

He raised the pen a few inches above Rey’s knee, right over the meaty part of her thigh, and she watched with narrowed eyes as he slammed it down with full force. White hot, throbbing pain rushed down Rey’s leg and she hissed, clenching Finn’s hand until his knuckles went pale. Her other, empty hand clenched wildly at air. She could practically feel the bruise blossoming on her thigh.

_ God _ , she hated heats.

Finn said nothing as she nearly took his fingers off, just winced as the needle went into her leg and winced again when it was drawn out, leaving a spot of blood behind. 

“It’s worse watching it than experiencing it,” he said, making a distinct gag face as Poe wrapped the used pen in the plastic pharmacy bag and stuffed it into Rey’s bathroom trash. Finn ripped off a few pieces of toilet paper and pressed them gently to the wound the pen left behind.

“Is it?” Rey asked wryly, taking the handful of toilet paper from him. She squeezed Finn’s hand - gently this time - to take the sting off her rejection, before she shoved him away from her thigh and took over. It was easy strangling the life from his fingers when she was about to get stabbed, but her Omega couldn’t process even the most gentle brush of limbs on limbs right now. 

Finn smiled at Rey as his hand landed on his own thigh, and she knew he didn’t feel any hurt at being pushed away. 

“Touché, peanut brittle,” he quipped, grinning now. Rey snorted.

She could feel the warmth from the emergency suppressant suffusing her muscles, leaving a languorous feeling that was only too familiar. She’d spent the majority of her heats since she was eighteen like this, half in and half out of consciousness, plagued with odd dreams she only remembered in snatches when everything was over and clarity returned. Soon, the warmth would dissipate and her limbs would be heavy as bricks, her head like a lead weight. She wouldn’t feel the tenderness in her cunt anymore or the desperate flooding of slick down her thighs. Everything below her waist would be numb.

Just as she liked it. She could finally sleep. Her Omega would finally  _ finally _ be silent.

Finn scooted closer to her as the warmth slipped down her calves to her curled toes, up her thighs to her core, making her clit tingle before she felt nothing at all. Her fingers twitched, and then lay still on her knees, her neck starting to roll.

The little bathroom spun as if Rey were drunk, and Poe stepped forward to catch her before she could slip off the tub’s edge. Finn’s hands supported her back and neck, preventing any contact with the porcelain.

“Okay pork chop,” Poe said, his casual tone too loud in the small space. “Let’s get you to bed.” He and Finn scooped Rey up between them and she barely felt their hands at all. 

All she could think as her friends carried her to her bed, where her damp, filthy sheets had been replaced with a new floral set and a thick layer of heat towels she kept in the bottom drawer of her bureau, was  _ finally. _

**

She was conscious in brief snatches over the next three days. 

She remembered Finn sharing her bed, sitting with his shirtless back up against the wall, his laptop balanced on a breakfast tray at the center of her mattress. He didn’t touch her, but he was there and that was enough. 

Then: Poe switching with Finn so he could shower and eat, watching bits and pieces of  _ Parks and Recreation _ , chuckling with his mouth full of chips or popcorn. Every few minutes, his head would turn, and he would smile at her.

“Everything’s okay honey,” He would say, in a voice that was just a bit too slurred. “You’re okay.”

They both ignored the rare moments she swam up from unconsciousness to rub her tender sex wantonly against the pillow tucked between her thighs, or moaned helplessly at the  _ emptiness _ as she clenched on nothing. They rubbed her back when she groaned into her bed sheets as the shadow of a cramp washed over her. They never judged her, they never left her alone.

Finn fed her sometimes, mostly focusing on getting enough water into her so an ER visit wouldn’t be necessary, but he gave her saltines with peanut butter and pieces of rotisserie chicken to keep her protein levels up. Rey choked and gagged on the food, but swallowed it down with Finn’s insistence.

They gave her another injection in the night, probably halfway through her heat, though the passage of time was like swimming through soup. She was dreaming of rain, of droplets slipping down a window pane, when her lower abdomen throbbed and her toes tingled with a sudden awareness. Finn woke her with gentle fingers, stroking her hair and holding her back against his bare chest as Poe prepped the pen and inserted it again, this time in her opposite thigh. 

After that, the entire world was just a dream, a blurry mating of color with darkness.

**

_ She finds him in the light of a setting sun, the sky behind them a thousand shades of gold and apricot and blush, clouds thick as a man’s hand spread out across the horizon.  _

_ Rey stands, naked as the day she was born, on a rocky outcropping she knows was taken from either a fantasy book series or a film she watched once (Labyrinth?), because it lacks too many details to be a memory. She feels no gravel under her bare feet, no bits of grass or weeds brushing her toes. She is simply standing on smooth ground, like concrete.  _

_ He’s tall, so tall he casts a long shadow down the outcropping and nearly blocks out those last rays of sun. Rey has to crane her neck back to see his face, which is both familiar and strange to her. _

_ Sharp, pale cheekbones, an aquiline nose. A full head of rich black waves perfectly framing his features. Pale lips, full as sin.  _

_ Moles dotting his face like tiny stars. _

_ She knows this face, doesn’t she? She knows the dark eyes watching her like a lion would a gazelle. She just can’t quite place them, as if her mind won’t stretch that far. _

_ Where she is bare, he is covered head to toe in black. A black tunic that hugs the broad slopes of his shoulders with perfect precision, black leggings, black boots. His leggings are so tight, she can see every muscle in his massive thighs through the thin material. And best of all, he wears black gloves to the wrist. It’s an almost delicious feeling, being naked with a clothed man in her dreams. _

_ He holds one gloved hand out to her as the sunlight streams behind him, his mouth curved in the most gentle smile even as his eyes burn.  _

_ ‘I know you,’ that smile says, loud enough to scream. ‘Don’t you know me?’ _

_ ‘I do,’ Rey thinks. She takes a step forward, and then another, her feet brushing nothing. Finally, her hand slips into his, and it’s like touching a frayed wire. ‘I do.’ _

_ His hand is so warm despite the cool leather encasing it, his fingers so delightfully thick that goosebumps rise across her forearms, shivering over her mating gland at the sight and feel of them. They nearly engulf hers as their hands twine together. _

_ He pulls her close, so close that she can now feel how muscular his chest and abdomen are, can feel the strength coiled in his forearms and biceps. It’s such a visceral feeling that it makes her core throb. Up close, he smells like pine trees and coffee and everything she has ever wanted, everything she finds delicious and comfortable and safe.  _

_ She looks up, from the sharp curves of his chin to the quirked, sweet edges of his mouth. With her free hand, she reaches for him, and though she knows this is a dream, a drugged heat dream at that, when her fingers brush his cheek, she swears she can feel their texture, their heat. _

Before he can lean down and press his lips to hers, before their contact can go beyond chasteness to the territory of red hot instinct, the dream fades to nothing, and Rey wakes with tears in her eyes.

Her sex is fully numb now, her body relaxed, her legs tangled in her comforter. She had looked forward to this, to the oblivion of sleep that would distract her from either inflicting permanent clitoral nerve damage on herself or possibly texting Ben Solo her address in a fit of desperation. But now, her heart is in a vice of misery and longing. 

Why did her subconscious have to make him smile like that? The way she’d always wanted to be smiled at? Why did it have to be something out of a romance novel, almost chaste in its perfection?

Not for the first time this week, or this month really, Rey’s eyes filled with frustrated tears.


	7. pleased you greatly last night. we sit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IT'S HAPPENING FOLKS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL. This is gonna get plotty soon!!!! And our dorks are texting!!

**Three Days After Rey’s Heat**

_ Time stamped 8:08am: _

**Ben:** Good morning :)

_ Time stamped 10:02am _

**Rey:** Ugh, how are you up so early? Good ACTUAL morning.

**Ben:** I don’t work the night shift, that’s why. You know what they say about early birds.

**Rey:** Touché. You’re a walking cliche, btw.

**Ben:** Okay ee cummings :D

**Rey:** Haha. 

**Ben:** So I have an idea…

**Rey:** Did it take a lot of effort?

**Ben:** Aren’t you hysterical? I didn’t sprain anything...this time. Ready for it? Drumroll please.

**Rey:** I’m rolling my eyes, more like.

**Ben:** Of course you are. Since we’re getting to know each other, how about the aptly titled Question Game?

**Rey:** …Elaborate.

**Ben:** Like an infinite 21 questions. If the other person forfeits a question or refuses to answer, the asker gets to ask the question again at another time when the askee feels comfortable.

**Rey:** Hmm. Intriguing. 

**Ben:** You up for it? 

**Rey:** What if I’m too…

**Ben:** Squirrelly? 

**Ben:** Chicken?

**Ben:** A cat on a hot tin roof?

**Ben:** Skittish as a horse?

**Ben:** Nervous as a hare?

**Rey:** Are you done with the aphorisms?

**Ben:** I am NOW. Anyway, what do you think?

**Rey:** Fine, fine. You’re lucky I’m bored and have the week off. What are the rules?

**Ben:** Nice. My rules? Simple, I have one. If possible, total honesty. Otherwise, forfeit the question. Do you have any rules?

**Rey:** No sexual questions. No pushing if boundaries are established. 

**Ben:** Deal. If you tell me any question is unwelcome, I’ll withdraw it unless you tell me it can be asked another time.

**Rey:** I’m in. Who wants to go first? Is there a goal? Who wins?

**Ben:** The goal is to get to know each other without all the awkward silence. I know this is surprising, but there isn’t a winner. At least not to me. After you :)

**Rey:** Hmm, I don’t know how I feel about a game with no winner, but I’ll give it a try. Why did you move to Portland?

**Ben:** Competitive, are you? I like it. On that note, the goal could be blackmail material. I moved to Portland to help my mother. I was living in NY for seven years and she kept asking why I didn’t want to move back to OR to be around family. I finally listened to her advice a few months ago when she asked if I wanted to freelance for her company. Are you from the area?

**Rey:** You’re a real smartass, you know that? No, I’m not from the area. I was born in England and came over with my mother when I was 4-5, somewhere around there. I don’t remember much. I moved to Portland after graduating from college in CA.

**Ben:** Stanford, right? Where in England?

**Rey:** Two questions, huh? Already cheating at your own game. Yep, Stanford. Great decision right during a recession, haha lol rofl, etc. 

**Ben:** I’m choosing to ignore that. I never cheat. Yeah, the recession makes student loans an even shittier situation these days. You only know your mother’s first name? I remember you said you were raised in foster care. When did that happen, if you’re comfortable talking about it?

**Rey:** Sure you don’t :). 

You’re telling me, half my paycheck goes to Nelnet. Insert middle finger here. My mother’s name was Claire. I only know her name and her eye color. I have a rather blurry memory of her face, and all I know is she looked nothing like me, which is both weird and comforting?

I’m okay talking about it if you’re okay with a nice little sob story. She left me in a hospital in Quartzsite AZ when I was almost 6. I went into foster care that year. If I have a father, I have no clue where he is or who he is. My closest relative is my best friend, basically my foster brother. We were in two of the same Omega homes growing up.

**Ben:** Half? Have you consolidated? And no, that’s not my question. 

Jesus, Rey. I’m so sorry about your mom. It’s good you have your foster brother with you. He’s an Omega too?

**Rey:** It’s fine, it was a long time ago. And I told you it was a sob story. Yep, his name is Finn and he’s an Omega too. He was always the only boy in any of the Omega after school programs. 

**Ben:** Not a sob story. It’s not fine, it must have been hard for you and I’m sorry you went through any of it. 

Finn? I knew someone named Finn once. He was an Omega too. Small world. 

**Rey:** Well, thanks. It was forever ago and I don’t remember much, but it’s appreciated all the same. Really? What a small world indeed. 

**Ben:** Were you and Finn both raised in AZ?

**Rey:** Yep, at least until I went to college in CA. Finn went on a cross country road trip during my freshman and sophomore years.

**Ben:** Well, I have to head into a long day of pain in the ass work meetings in a second. Can I message you tonight?

**Rey:** Sure, have a good day at work.

**Ben:** Have a nice day, Rey :)

_ Timestamped 6:00pm, same day: _

**Ben:** You know, you never answered my question.

**Rey:** Hello to you too. Which one?

**Ben:** Hello :) The one about where you’re from in England.

**Rey:** Oh, well I was really little when I left, so I have no idea. I think it was Liverpool? I don’t have a UK birth certificate or anything though, just a random accent despite having lived in the US my entire life.

**Ben:** You still have an accent, huh? Do you use the “ou” spellings too?

**Rey:** Ha -_- sometimes, just to be pretentious. It’s ren AY ssance, thank you.

**Ben:** Of course. REN ah ssance is just another example of the insularity of American language ;)

**Rey:** Okay Professor Solo. You never answered MY question about consolidating. Rude of you not to share your expertise with a newb graduate.

**Ben:** Oops. Wait, what was the question? I could get used to you calling me Professor Solo ;)

**Rey:** I’m rolling my eyes at these antics. 

**Ben:** Okay okay. Consolidation’s when you just combine all the loans into one so you can do a single payment instead of a shitload. You should be able to start the process on Nelnet’s site.

**Rey:** WHAT! I’ve been paying on each loan individually for two years now! That isn’t necessary?

**Ben:** Nope, not at all. Want me to email you the link? If you’re okay with exchanging emails.

**Rey:** Well, you don’t seem like a serial killer.  [ reyniima7@gmail.com ](mailto:reyniima7@gmail.com) . Original, I know.

**Ben:** What makes you so sure? Just kidding, I swear I’m not hiding bodies anywhere. I would call that email professional, but who am I to talk. I’m  [ solo80@gmail.com ](mailto:solo80@gmail.com) . I’ll send some resources tonight if you want?

**Rey:** Are you REALLY sure? :) And thanks Ben, that would be amazing. Anyway, I have to get up at the actual crack of dawn tomorrow, so I’m going to pass out in a few minutes. Want to talk in the morning?

**Ben:** REALLY REALLY sure :) No problem, I’m glad to help make that shitshow a little easier to handle every month. Expect an email by morning.

I’d like that. Sleep well.

**Rey:** You too.

**Four Days After Rey’s Heat**

_ Timestamped 5:25am: _

**Ben:** Good morning, it’s the actual crack of dawn. You up yet? 

_ Timestamped 7:01am: _

**Rey:** You are the absolute worst, has anyone ever told you that?

**Ben:** Has anyone ever NOT told me that, is the real question :)

**Rey:** Hmm. 5am though? Why are you always up at the most ungodly hours?

**Ben:** I workout early and then start my freelancing jobs after. It’s a pain in the ass sometimes, but I’ve gotten used to it over the years.

**Rey:** Ugh you workout too. 

**Ben:** Ha. I take it you don’t?

**Rey:** Absolutely not. I mean, I did in college but now I’m lucky if I feel like walking from the bus stop to work. The only time I’ll be running is if I didn’t pay the MAX faire and the cops are after me. Or zombies.

**Ben** : Zombies would be a good reason to run. But nothing wrong with not working out. Night shift is exhausting enough. Do you like it?

**Rey:** Sort of? I have more energy at night sometimes, but I took the shift mostly because of workplace designation laws. I’ve pretty much always worked the night shift, even in high school.

**Ben:** I’ve heard of the designation laws for workplaces, but haven’t worked at a lot of offices that put them into place, so I apologize in advance for my ignorance. You’re forced to work night shift? Or separated?

**Rey:** Aren’t you lucky :) I’m not forced to necessarily, but there are quotas on how many unmated Omegas can work in a full office. 

**Ben:** Eh, privileged you mean. Rey, I hate to correct you but that sounds like force.

**Rey:** I wouldn’t say privileged, just that you didn’t graduate during a recession, haha. Oh well, that’s the theme of Omega life! I definitely brought the mood of this conversation down. Oops.

**Ben:** Okay, true. I would still argue that Alphas are the privileged ones in this situation, there never seems to be a quota on how many of us are in a workplace. You didn’t bring the mood down, you stated a fact. Would it make you more comfortable if the subject were changed?

**Rey:** Please. And thank you for stating that.

**Ben:** Alright, it IS your turn to ask a question :) (No need. It’s a fact.)

**Rey:** :) Genius! Are your parents still married?

**Ben:** Yep, my parents are still married. They have separate houses for when my mother inevitably tells my dad to fuck off biannually , but they haven’t divorced. Yet. They separated for two years when I was working on my masters, but that’s about it. 

**Rey:** Your parents sound entertaining, at least. Do you have any siblings?

**Ben:** They are. They’re two of the messiest people I’ve ever met and I refused to talk to them for years when I was a, in the parlance of our times, “emo asswipe,” but they love each other for exactly who the other person is, warts and all. Guess you can’t have it any better than that. And nope, only child. Product of two Alphas in a 99% Alpha family. 

**Rey:** Ha, emo asswipe. Filing that away for blackmail material. But really, 99%? Who was the 1%? Must be quite the legacy.

**Ben:** I knew there was a devious side to you. My grandmother Padme was the only non-Alpha in the family. She was an Omega. And yeah, the legacy bit is fairly accurate when it comes to the garbage fire I’d call my genes.

**Rey:** Devious, or just resourceful? Oh wow, really? Were they a mated pair? Sorry if that’s too nosy.

**Ben:** Definitely a delightful mix of both :) Now, before I answer that, it’s a bit of a proverbial skeleton in my family’s proverbial closet. Are you ready?

**Rey:** That’s not ominous at all.

**Ben:** I have a flare for the dramatic. It’s a bit of a horrible story and involves abuse of women, so asking consent to tell it is mandatory.

**Rey:** Oh, I understand. I’d like to know, if you want to tell it. 

**Ben:** You’ll find I’m practically an open book. I share too much actually. My grandparents were a mated pair, but it didn’t end well. And here it is: my grandfather killed my grandmother during a rut. He was an inventor and writer, took a lot of drugs during the Beatnik period. It was suspected he was under the influence of something when it happened. I’m sorry for switching back to a horrible subject. I want you to know that drug use and spousal or Omega abuse aren’t rampant in my family.

**Rey:** Oh my god, Ben. I am so sorry. I’m freaked out that that happened to your Grandmother, but I don’t think what your Grandfather did is genetic, if that’s what you mean. I’ve heard of that sort of thing happening before, ruts making Alphas do horrible things. Mixing drugs with rut would cause issues too. Thank you for trusting me enough to share that with me. It doesn’t affect my opinion of you.

**Ben:** Thank you Rey :) That means something to me.

**Five Days After Rey’s Heat:**

_ Timestamped 8:00am: _

**Rey:** Ugh, so sorry. I completely passed out while we were talking about such a serious topic. 

**Ben:** That’s okay, you needed your sleep. How are you?

**Rey:** Tired still, haha. I’m always tired these days, thanks to the evils of Portland winters. How are you?

**Ben:** I’m alright, thanks. I hate Portland for that exact reason. Pollution and no sun for 4-6 months out of the year. No snow even. How do you handle it? I already feel like I’m becoming a vampire.

**Rey:** Haha yeah...no. I grew up without any snow at all, so I think I’d die of frostbite if I lived somewhere that snowed a bunch or got under freezing. But I agree, the pollution’s pretty bad, and after awhile everyone feels that way. That’s why customer service jobs are hell here: everyone’s mad and they want a scapegoat. I mainly survive with a cheap vitamin D supplement and the will to pay my bills XD

**Ben:** From ee cummings to Eminem.

**Rey:** Hilarious.

**Ben:** Absolutely :)

**Rey:** :P. Are you from New York?

**Ben:** I was born there, raised in Hillsboro oddly enough, and moved back to NY when I was 13 to live with my uncle. Just ended up sticking there. Have you ever gone back to England?

**Rey:** HA! Like I’d have the money. Nelnet is crushing my soul. 

**Ben:** Hopefully it gets better before it gets worse. I’ve found I like your soul. So far :)

**Rey:** The only two options: getting hit by a TRIMET bus, or winning the lottery. I’m going for the TRIMET bus.

**Ben:** You could always sell Adderall prescriptions. People love their stimulants.

**Rey:** But the sweet embrace of death!

**Ben:** … No.

**Rey:** You need to get up to speed on millennial humor, grandpa. I promise I have no intention of dying yet, unless by dying you mean sleeping for a week.

**Ben:** I will have you know, I’m only eight years older than you. 

**Rey:** Jeez. 

**Ben:** ...rude.

**Rey:** You’re going to need Life Alert soon.

**Ben:** Men in my family have the unfortunate habit of living too long, so I think I’ll be fine.

**Rey:** Living too long? That’s both ominous and reassuring.

**Ben:** You’re telling me. Ready for another question?

**Rey:** Shoot.

**Ben:** Favorite book/s?

**Rey:** You’re asking me to choose a favorite child. It’s a tie between LOTR, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. You?

**Ben:** You like Tolkien? Do you have a favorite? I have multiple as well. The Two Towers and the Brothers Karamazov. 

**Rey:** You would be a Dostoevsky fan. Yep, I love Tolkien. I’m between Fellowship and the Adventures of Tom Bombadil. One of my foster families gave me the Hobbit as a birthday gift when I was little, and Tolkien stuck with me ever since. 

**Ben:** Why do I have the distinct feeling you’re roasting my taste in literature?

**Rey:** I’m just saying, you were frowning and wearing mostly black the few times I’ve seen you. It would either be Dostoevsky or Stoker. 

**Ben:** Do you think I like Marilyn Manson too?

**Rey:** You said it, not me :)

**Ben:** I was more grunge as a teenage emo asswipe than whatever faux industrial nonsense Manson’s going for.

**Rey:** Now you have to name your favorite bands as a teenage emo asswipe and favorite bands as a slightly less emo adult. I didn’t make up the rules.

**Ben:** I’d just like to point out that you didn’t call me an asswipe :)

**Rey:** That comes later.

**Ben:** Based on that statement, is it safe to assume there could be a later? 

**Rey:** There may be a chance of one. 


	8. quietly, side by side, to eat,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [rey's highschool mix](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5lQTcQdVhogFCRHND5RIDc?si=4z5S6_YXRRaSFjXQ0F3Tjg)   
> [ben's highschool mix](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ddZIcOvGy8PmHm066hmbY?si=YMJJmgXwQ32FU5FeezL8VA)   
> i'm trash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you everyone for the feedback, comments, reblogs, etc!!! i am so so grateful. 
> 
> thank you as always to [hipgrab](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrymegtargaryen/pseuds/hipgrab), who looked this chapter over for me when it was about 12 pages long. <3 thank you for being the best.
> 
> this fic's turned into a bit of a beast. please excuse any typos or inconsistencies, i had a bit of a block this time around and didn't want to subject anyone to my 20 page monster lolol. i couldn't even be bothered with formatting this chapter.
> 
> me throwing my garbage fic at you:  
> 

_Next Day:_

**Ben** : Okay, top albums when I was an emo asswipe teenager. Excellent question.

  1. Walk Among Us, Misfits
  2. How Could Hell Be Any Worse, Bad Religion
  3. Nevermind, Nirvana (it's a classic, leave me alone)
  4. Doolittle, The Pixies
  5. Call the Doctor, Sleater-Kinney



And now, the adult favorites:

  1. Honkey Chateau, Elton John
  2. Horses, Patti Smith
  3. Closer, Joy Division
  4. Led Zeppelin IV
  5. Different Kind of Tension, Buzzcocks



Not much of a change. Everything’s still pretty angry.

 **Rey** : Seriously? You weren't emo, you were the 1990s version of a hipster.

 **Ben** : How dare you.

 **Rey** : :D

 **Ben** : You clearly have to tell me yours now.

 **Rey** : I was 16 in 2003. You realize how terrible music was back then, right?

 **Ben** : I was 16 in 1995. That's all I have to say.

 **Rey** : Please, You had Foo Fighters, Garbage, Rancid...classic hip hop! Even pop artists in the mid-90s were tolerable. No Doubt!!! Janet Jackson! 

**Ben:** Two words: Sheryl. Crow.

 **Rey** : Okay, good point. Still, just try comparing her to Evanescence and Avril Lavigne.

 **Ben:** You're deflecting. It's your turn.

 **Rey:** Oh god, fine. You asked.

 **Rey:** As a teen:

  1. AFI, Sing the Sorrow
  2. The Distillers, Sing Sing Death House
  3. Garbage, self titled
  4. The Used, self titled
  5. Taking Back Sunday, Tell All Your Friends



6 bonus: The Killers, Hot Fuss

Yes, I was actually emo, okay. Unlike your pretentious indie punk self over there. I saved up for months to buy a pair of checkered vans, ha. It was THAT bad.

 **Ben:** Emo for early 2000s’ standards, that is. That Garbage album was pretty damn good. Let me guess: Only Happy When it Rains was your favorite track? ;) 

**Rey:** The early 2000s created the emo genre, thank you very much. 

It was. ...how did you know? :)

 **Ben:** Perfected it maybe. We could argue angry teens have been screaming into microphones over crashing drums for much longer.

 **Rey:** Okay, you have a point. The movement WAS created in the 80s. But the 2000s really marinated in that message of utter misery.

 **Ben:** Absolutely true. Papa Roach, anyone?

 **Rey:** Ha! I forgot about Papa Roach. CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES! THIS IS MY LAST RESORT!

 **Ben:** Oh god.

 **Rey:** SUFFOCATION!!!

 **Rey:** NO BLEEDING

 **Ben:** No please

 **Rey:** DON'T GIVE A FUCK IF I CUT MY ARM BLEEDING!!!!!

 **Ben:** Do I need to cry uncle?

 **Rey:** Haha, I could go on for awhile. It was a classic of its time.

 **Ben:** An abomination, maybe.

 **Rey:** True, but what WASN’T? Although as I get older, I identify more and more with 2007 Britney when she shaved her head. When it comes to eldritch abominations: nothing compares to Sk8ter Boi.

**

4pm found Rey at her desk, headset on, barely listening to a middle aged customer’s tangent about their wifi connection. 

She should have made two cups of her infamous coffee sludge, she thought, as she notated the call briefly in her postits app, even though it would probably end with the customer hanging up on her. The first cup just wasn’t penetrating the haze of exhaustion.

“It’s ridiculous that I’m paying $120 a month for internet and the box doesn’t even work!”

If Resistance Tech had actually been an internet provider, Rey would sympathize. However, they were a software company. This customer had clearly dialed the wrong number, but due to the company’s Quality Assurance standads, Rey couldn’t just _say_ that. She had to skirt around it and waste twenty minutes getting yelled at.

“I understand. Have you tried contacting your internet provider for more clarification?”

“You ARE my internet provider!!”

Rey propped her elbow next to her keyboard and let her forehead fall into her upturned hand, barely suppressing a groan. Normally, she could push the churning frustration down, tell herself she was getting paid and the call wouldn’t last forever, but today she was sorely tempted to just hang up.

A job, any job, was great in this economy. But she wouldn’t wish a position in customer service on her worst enemy.

...Okay, maybe she’d wish it on Hitler. Or last year’s upstairs neighbor, who listened to Beethoven Sonatas at a deafening decibel...at two a.m. Or Unkar Plutt....

“I would recommend finding the number for your internet provider on the bottom of your router. This is Resistance Technologies, a software development company.”

Fuck it. Let her QA score drop a bit. She had better things to be doing. Like bashing her head repeatedly against the window until she passed out.

When the phone call ended just the way Rey predicted, she set herself to _out of queue_ to update her call report spreadsheet, which Snap reviewed once a month before their one on one meeting. As she went through the motions, the quick copy/pasting practically muscle memory by now, she glanced out the open window toward the apartment across the courtyard.

Ben was gone this time of day, not returning until well into Rey’s shift when the seats around her were empty. His sweet little cat, Punisher however, rarely moved from her cat tree beside the window when he was gone. She just stared across the yawning space at Rey with her lamplike yellow eyes, not even vanishing to eat. It was unnerving. 

Through the hazy mid-afternoon light, she could see Punisher peeking at her underneath the gauze curtains Ben had installed the week before and kept half-raised just for her. She sat cleaning one graceful paw with long swipes of her tongue, alternating between licks and stares in Rey’s direction. 

Rey peeked around her second monitor to see if Snap or Jannah were heading down the central aisle, then retrieved her phone from behind one of her succulents on the windowsill.

 **Rey** : Ben, your cat is staring at me again. This is a hostile work environment.

She set her phone on the other side of her keyboard where it could be mostly hidden by her elbow, and put herself back in the phone queue. She busied herself with checking the website help chat, which was dead outside of some guy asking if Resistance Tech could fix his dick. Predictable.

Mere moments later, she felt the telltale buzz.

 **Ben:** She’s in for a serious reprimand when I get home. No Fancy Feast tonight.

 **Rey:** Fancy Feast? Please. You totally buy her organic grassfed food from the local tiny pet store for $5 a can. Admit it :D

 **Ben:**...you caught me. I can’t help it, she knows what she wants.

Rey had always, _always_ wanted to be alone. When she was a little girl, she never imagined a future with a partner and a child, or even a pet. Instead, she pictured space. Size never mattered in her daydreams, it could be a hovel with a garden and a bookshelf, as long as it was, most importantly, _hers_. A place she didn’t have to share with anyone.

Perhaps it was less the desire to be alone and more the...resignation that occurred after being left too many times. But either way, how dare this man...this _Alpha_ poke the slumbering beast buried under all of that rubble. The beast that was her craving for companionship. Her _nature_. 

Ben had the annoying habit of making Rey want to be _less_ alone.

The phone trilled in her ear again, but Rey’s focus was lost. _She_ was lost. As the remaining afternoon hours trickled past like drops from a leaking faucet, she alternated between answering inane calls and messaging Ben. It bordered on a compulsion.

By the time Jannah and Snap wandered out, laughing at Snap’s collection of customer service memes, and the chat shut down for the night, Rey simply sat at her desk, leaning back in her chair, phone held tightly between two hands. 

**Ben:** How’s work?

 **Rey:** Boring. Inane. At times headache inducing. You?

 **Ben:** Eh, it used to be worse. 

**Rey:** Used to?

 **Ben:** Used to be a lot worse. Before I met you.

When Rey blushed, she blushed everywhere. She felt the flush spread over her chest, trickling up her neck and exploding like a firecracker over her cheeks, leaving her skin hot and tight. Her relationship with Ben had been mostly platonic since the night he taped that note to his window. Despite their complementary designations and Rey’s painful reactions to his scent, they barely breached the level of confidante.

Except...sometimes, Rey got the feeling that Ben was testing the waters with her. She tried to play it off as the cacophony of her Omega’s over-active imagination, but...this was flirting, right? It had to be.

Rey looked up at the ceiling far above, the cobwebs, the intricate pattern of exposed pipes, the cracked cement. She tried to picture a future that wasn’t just space, wasn’t just bookshelves and a garden and an empty bed. A future that involved holding someone’s hand, the same strong hand she’d watched lift boxes and run through luxurious hair. 

The same hand she sometimes pictured dwarfing his cell phone as he messaged her back. All long, blunt fingers and a palm the size of her face. God.

She couldn’t allow herself to hope for anything more than that, to see it unfolding before her like a film reel. Just the brief touch of hands, a caress of fingers, like the heat-dream she’d had so long ago. 

Could she?

Rey took a deep breath, and blew it out so forcefully her ribs felt cracked. Maybe. Maybe she could.

 **Rey:** I know how you feel :)

She quickly jammed the send button before she could lose her nerve and nearly threw her phone back onto her desk, shoving it beneath a pile of yellow notepads under a monitor riser. Her face burned.

With trembling fingers, Rey turned her work phone off and clocked out for lunch just five minutes early. She’d brought a peanut butter and banana sandwich this time instead of the usual chicken ramen, and she sat slumped in her chair, eating it in huge, cheek-puffing mouthfuls, only glancing occasionally at her phone’s hiding place. 

She _loved_ peanut butter and banana sandwiches, her childhood staple. But today it tasted like she was chewing cotton balls: thick and flavorless. 

Her phone trilled and vibrated three times before she had the courage to retrieve it. She cursed her trembling fingers as she scrolled through to her messages.

 **Ben:** I hope this isn’t too presumptuous of me, Rey, but can I call you sometime?

Rey choked on her half-chewed bite of sandwich, spraying the screen of her phone with peanut butter spit and bits of $2 whole wheat bread. 

_CALL_??? As in, speak to each other with their actual voices?

She wiped her phone off on her jeans and just stared at its smudged, cracked surface, her face so flushed she felt like a heat flash was coming on. What was she supposed to do here? If she spoke to him over the phone, would he want nudes next? Cybersex? God forbid...an in person meeting? Or did he just want to gauge how standoffish and awkward she could be when they weren’t typing?

She could barely send him a smiley face, let alone speak to him like an actual adult _with her voice_. 

Rey exited out of her messages with Ben just as three little dots began to bounce in the bottom left corner of the screen. Ugh. 

There was only one person she trusted enough to seek advice from. 

**Rey:** Finnyyyyyyyy

And he never kept her waiting.

 **Finn:** Reyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

 **Rey:** Remember that Alpha?

 **Finn:** YES. Yes girl yes!!! Developments?

 **Rey:** Yes. We’ve been texting since before my...you know. And he wants to talk on the phone.

Finn sent a series of exclamation marks, gifs of shrieking celebrities, and pictures of Opossums surrounded by hearts. Rey’s face was so flushed she could swear a fever was coming on. She logged back into her computer and set herself up for another half-shift of monotony, glancing out her window to see if Ben had come home yet to witness her full mental breakdown.

Luckily, his apartment was empty and dark. She couldn’t even see Punisher staring at her anymore.

 **Finn:** Oh shit, I cannot believe this. Can I tell Poe?

 **Rey:** No. 

**Finn:** We need witnesses. This is an important moment.

 **Rey:** Do I need to kill you?

 **Finn:** My little heterosexual Peanut’s all grown up and dating boys and stuff :( Alpha boys too!!

 **Rey:** I swear to god, Finn.

 **Finn:** Okay, I’ll stopppp :P. You’re not going to block him right?

Rey didn’t respond for several moments. She was actually considering it.

 **Finn:** Rey. At least tell me his name before you scrub your phone.

 **Rey:** No comment. And his name is Ben.

 **Finn:** Oooh. Is he nice to you? Has he sent a knot pic yet? Wait, you would have found his address and we’d be burying the body by now if he had. What do you two talk about?

 **Rey:** Don’t remind me that knot pics exist, please. I don’t need that mental image. We talk about music and Tolkien and stuff, you know. He’s really nice. He makes me laugh, he sends me knock knock jokes. But I CAN’T talk to him on the phone.

 **Finn:** Wtf why not??? You found a dude who likes TOLKIEN?? Does he like angry white people music too?

Rey didn’t reply, staring guitily at her computer screen.

 **Finn:** OMG Rey he does, doesn’t he? OMG!!!

 **Rey:** Stoppp

 **Finn:** NEVER. What if he’s like...it for you? Alpha, likes the same shit. Lives across from your work so you don’t even have to go to him, really. Has back muscles. What if we were rich, did that mate test that’s like 5 grand, and you found out it was HIM? How would you feel if you ghosted him now??

 **Rey:** Wow. That was super dramatic, but thanks. 

Ugh, the mate test. Another reminder of how poor she was. 

**Finn:** Rey honey. Just talk to the man. Give him a thirty minute phone call. Ask him idk...if he has a record collection. Portland men love that shit. Or do what Maz always said: talk about the weather. Lol. If he waited two weeks to ask you for a phone call, he could be just as shy as you.

Rey frowned at her phone, her nose scrunched up in frustration. He had a good point. She could always just...give Ben thirty minutes of her time. Right? She didn’t have to meet him, didn’t have to even talk for the full thirty minutes. If he started breathing heavily into the phone or talking about his knot, she could either just hang up or make up an excuse. 

Was she actually talking herself into this?

 **Rey:** I’m not shy.

 **Finn:** No, you’re antisocial as fuck. I love you. 

He really wasn’t wrong.

**

Rey knew she’d be hearing from her downstairs neighbor soon if she kept pacing, but she felt too jittery and restless to stay still.

They had set the call for 1:30.

Ben was an early riser, but he had the next day off and insisted he would be fine if they spoke for a bit before 2. Rey had hoped he’d ask to postpone until the next morning, or even the early afternoon, but no such luck. She barely had any time to prepare.

And by prepare: make a list of relevant conversation topics and try not to barf.

Rey spent the last hour of her shift shaking with nerves, her stomach in knots. She made the list with trembling fingers during the bus ride home, managing to type “more favorite bands,” “record collection?” and “RAIN?????” before giving up and turning her meditation podcast on.

And now, she slid across the floor in a worn pair of pastel blue fuzzy socks, trying not to imagine what Ben would sound like when he finally called her. Would he have a velvet-soft, sweet voice? Or would it be rough and grating like sandpaper? 

Rey shrieked, luckily with her mouth closed, or Mrs. Megri would be beating the ceiling with her broom, when her phone rang.

“I’m really going to kill you, Finn.”

“Nah,” Finn’s voice was muffled, as if he were speaking around a mouthful of food. “You love me too much. Now hit me with the ideas.”

Rey struggled to remember the list she’d typed out on her phone. 

“Um, Portland winters. Record collection. Early 1980s punk rock?”

Finn huffed,“Dear god woman.”

“I went braindead!!”

“Oh my god okay, let me finish my cheetos.” Rey rolled her eyes as the phone filled with the sound of munching. 

Several seconds of stomach roiling panic later: “Okay, we need reinforcements. You have 45 minutes until he calls.”

“No the fuck we do not.”

Rey heard the crinkle of a chip wrapper, then a gusty sigh. “Just let me tell Poe, PLEASE. He’s dated way more people than we have.”

Rey started turning circles on her rug, staring up at her pockmarked ceiling. Poe _had_ dated quite a few people before Finn, but she didn’t consider that a fair argument. Poe’s only advantage was that he had the best pep talks, the kind that made you feel like _yes, of course I can jump out of an airplane tomorrow morning. I got this!_ when you were terrified of heights. “Ugh, fine.”

She set the phone down on her shoulder just in time.

“HONEY!” Finn roared. “GET IN HERE!! REY MET A MAN!!!”

Rey imagined the resulting fuzzy clamor would be what a herd of punchdrunk reindeer would sound like, not one 31 year old man, 5’6 and probably two thirds of the way through a White Claw. Poe drank them like they were soda, in complete denial of their alcohol content.

“Okay,” Finn said at a reasonable volume. “Peanut, you’re on speaker.”

“Great.” Rey rubbed the beginnings of a tension headache at the bridge of her nose. 

“Alright,” Poe was all business as usual, like he was leading Huddle at work or planning a military campaign. “This is huge Rey! We’re so proud of you!”

“Already said that, hon.” Finn cut in.

Rey rolled her eyes.

“Okay okay, so what did you want to know?”

“We’re-”

“Rey met an Alpha. They’ve been texting. Now they’re going to talk on the phone in 32 minutes and Rey can’t think of any conversation topics.”

Rey was definitely getting a migraine. “Thanks mum.”

“Are you going to ask him if he has a record collection? Straight guys love tha-”

“Already on the list babe. Get on our level here.”

Poe snorted. She could imagine him patting Finn on the shoulder, the teasing smile they’d exchange.“Well, I’d just take his lead Rey. Let him ask you questions and go from there.”

“W-What if I freeze up?” Rey couldn’t keep that horrible vulnerability out of her voice. _What if he rejects me? What if Alpha isn’t pleased with me?_

“So?” Poe’s voice was gentle. “It’ll be okay. If he likes you, he should be able to handle a few awkward silences. And besides, he’s an Alpha. Just let him lead a bit, at least at first.”

Everything inside Rey that _wasn’t_ Omega balked at this, at war with her natural instincts to stop and please. It was exhausting, this constant internal battle. Maybe...just this once? 

“Okay,” she whispered, feet halting their nervous circle. The room spun a bit when she looked down from the ceiling. “Okay, I can let him lead. A bit. Maybe. At first.”

“You got this,” Poe said. She could _hear_ him grinning. “You do.”

Finn added,“You’ll do great!”

 _But I don’t want to do great,_ Rey thought, wringing her hands as her Omega cheered. _What if I don’t want to do this at all._

**

Finn and Poe disconnected with five minutes to spare, crowing at her about _wedding planning_. Rey was left to hyperventilate and wear a path into her hardwood. 

No matter how she tried to comfort herself, she still couldn’t tamp down the nausea, the visceral timidity that coiled itself around her insides like a virus. People, especially men, had judged her her entire life based on her designation. Thought she would be warm and soft and worst of all, _thankful_. Inviting. That she would step aside or kneel down to be dominated.

It was why she didn’t date: misogyny was bad enough without bringing evolution and designation into it. Heats were bad enough without being tied to a partner. And unfortunately, she was heterosexual.

And even more unfortunately for most Alphas: Rey didn’t kneel. 

Her phone vibrated in her hand and she startled so badly, it nearly went flying. Sighing, she ran her free hand through her hair, which hung in a thick, chestnut cascade over one shoulder, attempting a long breath through her nose to staunch the oncoming wave of panic. Thankfully, no one was calling her. 

**Ben:** Are you still okay with me calling?

Was she? She could still say no.

Right? Even though he cared enough to ask, which was rather uncharacteristic of an Alpha.

Rey shuffled to her kitchen counter and set her phone down, sinking onto a stool. Her head fell to her hands, and she felt the first prickle of frustrated tears.

Sometimes, she wondered if there was something permanently wrong with her. If years of loneliness, of starvation had fractured something inside of her that no amount of therapy or mindfulness could piece back together. Perhaps if she were someone else, she wouldn’t hesitate to acquiesce. Maybe she’d feel a bit nervous, or would even tremble and stutter a bit as she answered his call. But an excitement might lurk behind the nerves, not an icy cold dread.

Rey swiped at her eyes with her sleeves. She could still say no. She could tell him she wasn’t ready to speak yet, or even block him entirely and move on with her life, keep her space, her blank days. 

But something, something that wasn’t _just_ her whining inner Omega voice, told her she would regret it.

Rey took another deep, stuttering breath, and replied.

 **Rey:** I’m still okay with it.

 **Ben:** Okay, I’ll call in one minute. :) Looking forward to talking to you Rey.

 _God_. Why did he have to be so fucking accomodating? So un-Alphalike? If he just demanded something from her for once, she could easily hate him. 

Instead, to her all-encompassing chagrin, she felt something small and content and warm blossom in her chest. Something like hope.

A moment later, her phone rang.

Rey was so terrified in that moment that she contemplated letting the call go to voicemail. At the last possible second, she swiped to answer.

“H-Hello?” Was that breathy schoolgirl voice really hers?

“Hi Rey.”

The words hit her like a blow. Ben’s voice was everything Rey hadn’t known she wanted, and absolutely every single thing she had not expected: it was raw velvet, all quiet, rumbling precision. It rolled down her spine and hugged her insides like the embrace of a warm drink on a cold morning. She shuddered, wild and full-bodied, her glands nearly coming alive under her skin.

 _Alpha_ , her Omega whispered, preternaturally excited. _Alpha is here_.

_Oh shut up, you._

“Um,” was all that would come out, and in a rodent-like squeak too. Of course.

“...This is Rey, right? Did I call the right number? I could have sworn...” 

As he mumbled the digits of her phone number, Rey let his voice marinate under her skin, sink into her bones, before she had the strength to actually answer.

“Yeah um, this is the right number,” she coughed, trying to clear the sudden nervous rasp in her voice. She could fucking do this, she was a grown woman. “I’m Rey.”

“Oh good,” he said. “That would have been awkward.”

They both chuckled, hesitant and grating. 

“It would.”

_THINK OF SOMETHING TO SAY!!!!!_

This was already a disaster. She should just hang up on him, block his number, smother herself with her pillow-

A long, painful pause, and then...Ben laughed.

 _Laughed_. Full out. It was beautiful and self-deprecating, rough and smooth at once. Rey’s first instinct was to think he was making fun of her, chuckling at how ridiculous this conversation was already, not even five minutes in. But the nervous edge told her he was laughing at himself. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m terrible at this. If you want to hang up now…”

“No, no,” Rey rushed to reply. “I’m um, terrible at this too. We’ll be uh…”

“Terrible together?” Ben supplied. 

“Yeah.”

Another pause, this one almost, but not quite comfortable. 

And finally, “I’d like that,” Ben murmured. 

Rey’s cheeks warmed.

**

“How was your night? I didn’t get to see you when you were working.”

_He looks for me?_

“Oh, it was o-okay. Boring as usual, bus ride was fine.”

A short stretch of silence.

“Uh. How was yours?”

“Eh, it was alright. Pointless skype meetings, then the gym and dinner with my mother, which is always a joy.”

The dry humor from his text messages was present in his voice, and Rey couldn’t keep the tiny smile from twitching the corners of her mouth. Now _this_ was familiar. 

“I thought you liked your mother.”

_Too familiar?_

Ben’s chuckle was just rough enough to feel like a calloused hand at the back of Rey’s neck. Her mating gland, the traitorous bastard, warmed, as if it were blushing. 

_Not too familiar, then. Thank god._

“I _do_ in small doses, and absolutely not in social situations. She had me meet her at the Portland City Grille, which was--”

“Pretentious as hell,” Rey quipped, unable to help herself.

“Exactly, god forbid she pick up fast food.”

“Do _you_ even eat fast food?’ 

“No, but it’s the principle.”

“Sure it is.”

And just like that, they were off.

**

“You know, you still haven’t told me your top five adult albums.”

It was three am, Rey was burrowed under her blankets still in her lounge clothes, and they had been talking for an hour and a half. Ben’s voice had a hint of a tired roughness to it and Rey was close to whispering, but neither had said goodnight yet. They hadn’t even addressed the short, absolutely lame list Rey had composed on her bus ride home, or Finn and Poe’s recommendations. 

It was basically just a dance of words, a back and forth of teasing that left Rey with a clenched stomach and tense thighs.

She kept shuddering as he spoke, the mating glands at the back of her neck, tucked inside her wrists tingling as if his voice was a physical touch.

His voice was teasing as he added, “This is a grave offense.”

Rey surprised herself by laughing. She kept surprising herself tonight, it seemed. “A grave one, huh? What if my tastes aren’t as refined as yours?”

“As long as it isn’t Papa Roach, I think we’ll be fine.”

“Leave the miserable poster-band of millennial youth alone.”

“Never.”

Rey buried her pleased face in her blankets, grinning so hard her cheeks ached with the force. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled like this without rolling her eyes.

“Rude. Okay, give me a minute, this is painful.”

“Well, you do have to be brutal.”

“What about a firm top 20?”

“Hmm,” Ben murmured, hesitating, the sound almost like a purr through the phone’s speaker. Rey shifted under her bedding. She could feel the timbre of his voice all the way to her core.

_Embarrassing much?_

“How about a top five with three runners up?”

“Fine, but I hope you know you’re asking me to choose the cutest kitten in a litter.”

“The _top five_ cutest kittens. With three runners up. That’s basically choosing an entire litter.”

“Okay okay.” Rey took a moment to roughly shuffle her feet under her comforter, trying to dislodge the tingling goosebumps tickling her thighs. _Stop stop, useless Omega brain. Stoppp. He’s trying to ask me about music, not what I’m wearing._

“Number one…” she deliberated, scratching her nose. This really was difficult, like choosing a favorite child or the most adorable puppy picture. She had a grand total of 150 or more favorite albums. Narrowing that down to 8?

Music was a tangible thing to Rey. When she was young, she listened to whatever was put on the radio, whatever was played by peers between classes in middle and high school. She hadn’t had internet access for most of her childhood, and Jakku wasn’t exactly a paragon of culture. It only had two radio stations: country and Spanish-speaking news. Once Maz had taken her in, she’d finally been able to discover favorites in the old woman’s extensive vinyl collection, and after, she curated her own taste with the help of Spotify and Pitchfork.

Rey drew her knees to her chest, remembering the fond way Maz used to let her and Finn decide on a record, educating them on the genre, the year, telling them what she had worn when she’d first listened to it, how she’d felt. 

_Music is a sensation_ , she'd always said. And when the record began to play: _can you feel it?_

“Roberta Flack, First Take.”

“Huh, I haven’t heard that one in years.”

“It was um, one of the first albums my last foster mother played for me. Before that, I hadn’t heard much actual music.”

 _The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face_ had been life-changing played on Maz’s professional Bose sound system, collected during her years as a radio disk jockey in Seattle. Twelve year old Rey, lanky and coltish, laid next to the sound system for hours with her eyes closed, as Roberta Flack’s voice drifted over her skin like a caress.

“Then it’s a keeper.”

“Mm hmm, it is. Number 2: The Beatles’, Help.”

“Really? Over Revolver and Abbey Road?”

“Abbey Road is overrated.”

“Sacrilege.”

“Please. The only palatable song on that album’s Here Comes the Sun. The White Album is INFINITELY superior.”

“I’ll have you know, Abbey Road is a classic for a _reason._ Come Together, Octopus’s Garden, Something, Mean Mr Mustard.”

“I’ll give you Come Together. But Octopus’ Garden?”

Ben chuckled. “I loved that song when I was a kid. My mom used to play it.”

“Okay, you can have that one for nostalgia purposes.”

“Thanks.”

“Ready for Number 3?”

“Hit me.”

“It’s a modern one: Florence and the Machine, Ceremonials.”

“Huh, good choice.”

“No critique?”

“Nope.” She could hear the smile in his voice.

“Number four: Simon and Garfunkel, the Sounds of Silence.”

“I’m sensing a 60s theme here.”

“Absolutely. Mamas and the Papas, the beginning of Elton John’s career. Everything good started in the 60s.”

“I’d say fifties, personally with Chuck Berry, the Temptations, Fats Domino, but the 60s were pretty genius as a whole.”

“Okay, I’ll give you the 50s, although I cannot stand Elvis Presley.”

“Agreed.”

“Thank god.”

“I’m on the edge of my seat, shoot me number 5.”

“Ha, okay. I have the three runners up too, you know.”

“As you would.”

“You’re damn right. Anyway, Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow.”

“Okay, that’s a fantastic album.”

“Isn’t it? The next is Etta James, At Last.”

“You would love my parents’ vinyl collection.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s a relic, but my father gave it all to me a few years ago. I don’t play very many of their 60s records, but I know my mother collected all of Etta James’ stuff. And Jefferson Airplane’s.”

“She sounds like she has good taste.”

  
“She does.”

“Does she like Prince?”

Ben let out a loud but muffled laugh, as if he was holding the phone away from his mouth to spare her hearing. “Maybe. Which album?”

“1999.”

“Another good choice.”

“Ready for the last one?”

“Born ready.”

“Rumours. Fleetwood Mac.”

 _“Where did you come from?”_ He said it so earnestly that Rey drew up short in her teasing. 

“Jakku,” she said dumbly.

“No really,” Ben replied, sounding for all the world like he was being woken from a dream. “Where did I find you?”

“Um, you put up that sign after we saw each other across the--”

“Rey, can I talk to you again?”

Rey flopped backwards onto her pillows, her heard pounding like a desperate, wild thing inside her. She grinned nonsensically at the ceiling, excitement curling her free fingers into a fist at her side. _He wanted to talk again? What if he wants to see me too?_

_Alpha is pleased with us. Alpha approves. Alph-_

“Yes.”


	9. the long pancakes dangling and spilling,

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HIIIII everyone! so sorry for the late chapter, i've been dealing with health issues :( as always, i REALLY APPRECIATE ALL OF YOU. this story is seriously slow going so i hope this update isn't too disappointing! <3

_Timestamped 4:47am that morning:_

**Ben:** Good night Rey :) I had a great time talking with you.

Rey slipped her phone into the pocket of her yellow raincoat as she hopped down the stairs to the mailroom, a smile tugging the corners of her mouth. She’d fallen asleep with her phone clutched to her chest, having said a final sleepy goodbye to Ben at 4am. Even with a solid five hours of sleep, she didn’t feel exhausted. Her heart felt too big for her chest, as if something were germinating inside of her, waiting to bloom.

Rey pressed a hand to her grinning mouth as she drifted across the landing to the last set of stairs. Could this be what the beginnings of happiness felt like? 

She blew a soaking wet hank of hair out of her face, considering. 

She’d only been out of her apartment for mere moments and she was already despondently damp despite her coat and galoshes. Central Portland’s ever-present sheets of rain blew into the stairwell, wetting the strands of hair that had escaped her braid. Drops slid down her cheeks like tears. Even the ratty gray sweatpants she’d thrown on were claggy from the humidity and mist.

She usually hated January. Funny how the sharp bite of the wind didn’t make her frown or want to flip off the slate-gray sky today.

In fact, even the prospect of facing said wind to check her mail barely fazed Rey.

She’d been avoiding this task for weeks, even before her heat. She didn’t expect any packages, had no one who wished to contact her for any other reason except collecting money. Her more important bills were all paid online, so why not let the spam build up?

Once she finally reached the tin awning shielding the outside mailroom from the elements, Rey jammed her burnished little key into its matching lock, tapping her foot in frustration as it predictably stuck. After a brief struggle, during which Rey’s nose was scrunched practically to her forehead in utter frustration and she muttered enough cuss words to make a truck driver blush, the door to the tiny box burst open, revealing all the junk mail and paper bills she’d been avoiding for two months.

The post people had rolled and stuffed so many coupon books, pizza ads, and various sundry into such a small space that she had to tug them out one by one.

_Pizza Hut’s running a sale. Hmm. Nevermind, outdated._

Bill she’d paid.

Bill she’d paid.

Letter from Nelnet.

Bank statements.

Fred Meyer coupons.

It was 2020, and yet every single company in Portland still sent paper ads. So much for the future being now.

She’d tossed enough paper into the nearby garbage bin to kill off an entire national forest before she saw it, wrinkled and stuffed into the very center of her mailbox: a letter from Aetna, her insurance company. The only time she received any contact from her insurance was after a visit, and she hadn’t had one since summer the previous year. 

Rey frowned, yanking the envelope out of the box and immediately ripping it open. It was the only letter of interest so far and could only mean an imminent change in her plan or something equally drastic. 

Had Resistance forgotten to pay her premiums? Was one of last year’s visits denied?

Worrying at her chapped bottom lip with her teeth, Rey jerked the letter from its envelope and tossed the ripped paper in the direction of the trash can. 

_Aetna doesn’t discriminate. Ha._

She skimmed the bullshit about Aetna being an equal-opportunity money sucker and…

Wait.

Rey nearly dropped the letter. 

_All coverage for Omega emergency suppressants has been ceased under new FDA regulations._

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” her groan was lost between the heavy pattering of raindrops on the tin roof and the howl of the wind outside, but she was momentarily grateful no one else needed to check their mail at 9am. Especially the several families in her complex with young children.

Rey didn’t bother rifling through the rest of the mail in her box. She slammed the little silver door closed, wiggled the key to lock it, made sure her trash had actually made it to the can, and dashed up the stairs again, the letter held right in front of her face.

Rain splattered the paper and her cheeks as the wind picked up and blew great sheets of it across the staircase, but she barely noticed as her galoshes made little squeaking noises on the cement steps. Her stomach was a small, fearful thing inside her, clenched and taut. 

She’d never had an unassisted heat. What was she supposed to do now without those shots? Buy a knotted dildo? Knock herself out with a rubber mallet?

Xanax? Did opioids or narcotics even work on designateds?

_God..._

Was her primary care even still covered?

Rey reached the unlocked door of her apartment and barrelled through, letting it slam behind her. She didn’t even make it two steps inside, instead sliding down the door into a damp, numb pile in the entryway.

They couldn’t take her autonomy away, not when those injections were the only defense she had against nature. She’d spent so many years telling herself she was _more than her designation_ , more than an Omega, more than a tiny, trembling mouse trapped between the paws of a lion. She had opportunities, she could work and live and exist without an Alpha, without a nest. 

It was truly terrifying how one letter, one decision made by a company more dedicated to money than people, could rip all of that down. 

Rey drew her knees up, huddling into herself like she used to do when she was a child in so many strange rooms, with strange beds and even stranger people. Water streaked down her rain jacket and soaked into the thin material of her sweatpants, cold against her flushed skin. Her butt already started to fall asleep, tingling from the pressure of the hardwood. 

_What am I supposed to do now?_

**

Rey was sick of the constant emotional earthquakes. 

She was sick of being an Omega, an orphan, a foster child, a part-time worker, the working goddamn poor. When was life supposed to get _less_ complicated? 

Was it just...washing dishes, working with assholes, paying bills, getting shitty news, operating even shittier public transport because who could afford city parking, being constantly stressed and exhausted and disappointed and _unhappy_ until you died?

Rey chuckled to herself, the sound devoid of any actual amusement. _When was the last time I’ve actually been happy, well-slept, and generally pleased with my lot in life_ , she asked herself. _Outside of the five minutes I spent smiling this morning?_

To Rey, happiness was a fleeting, impossible thing, like trying to catch a wild sparrow with your bare hands or capture a butterfly without a net. She had brief, hazy moments of pleasure or joy, of course. Orgasms. Computer games, reading Tolkien. Watching Finn and Poe embrace, petting a stray cat on Hawthorne St, seeing the pregnant moon rise through a veil of wispy silver clouds outside her window at work. The first spring daffodils, rose gardens in full pungent August bloom, the sound of autumn rain tickling her roof when she knew she didn’t have to leave her bed. Finding a truly good book at a used store, or revisiting Austen or Jones in midwinter while snow fell, whisper-quiet, outside her window.

Momentary tidbits, like crumbs from a table. But true, overwhelming happiness? It was as unfamiliar to Rey as being an Alpha, as a tropical summer. As the proud gaze of a parent. 

( _Mama, where are you going?_ )

_God, how depressing._ Rey rubbed the aching inner corners of her eyes with her thumbs, dislodging the tiny tears building there. She wouldn’t cry today, she wouldn’t. She would scream at the disgusting unfairness of the world, rage against the proverbial machine, but she wouldn’t cry. Insurance was meant to fuck you over, after all. The entire system was. Hadn’t she learned that already?

In the hour or so since she’d found the letter, Rey had only been able to move from the cold hardwood to her desk chair. She huddled there now, wrapped in a cream waffle stitch blanket she’d whipped off the couch, sniffling, her raincoat heaped in a pile by the door. She was slumping forward across her desk feeling small and desolate and alone, when her phone chimed by her elbow. 

Frowning, Rey scooped it up and sat back again, throwing her legs up onto her desk. If Poe was cancelling the biannual LOTR rewatch, she would actually commit murder. She needed _something_.

But no. Finn had messaged at 7, his usual good morning greeting. Nothing from Poe, thank god. She would smother him in his sleep.

The waiting message was from Ben.

_Oh what the hell_ , she thought, her stomach warming even as she tried, desperately, to be caustic. She opened the messaging app. 

**Ben:** Good morning. How are you?

Rey frowned down at the screen, her heart twisting like a wrung-out towel. She stared at her phone for a long time, until Ben’s words faded to black, wondering what life was like when you were over 6’2, male, and Alpha. Was it any easier? And how did Ben feel, being who he was?

He’d never mentioned it during their conversations, but...did he relish being an Alpha? Or did he hate his status exactly as she despised her own? Alphas could work any shift without facing invasive questioning about mating status, and there would never be a ban on any blocks, but among Beta politicians, they were seen as rabid animals. Rey had seen ads denigrating Senator Organa as a too-volatile Alpha, which she’d always found a peculiar chicken-egg situation. What came first: anti-Alpha sentiments, or misogyny?

Is that how Ben Solo saw himself, a beast without a tether?

A strange curiosity came over Rey. Maybe, if she just had the courage to _ask_ , she could see if he felt as alone as she did. 

Before she could think enough to panic, Rey navigated to his contact page and pressed the call link. 

She barely heard a ring before Ben answered, his voice sending shivers down her spine. (Thankfully, that was her only reaction. No crippling stammers, no trembling. An almost visceral desperation made her feel short of breath. She had no room for nerves.)

“Rey?” Ben asked, sounding muffled and out of breath. She could hear a mechanical whirring sound in the background. “Are you okay?”

“Do you like being an Alpha?” Rey cut in, her voice too loud and too abrupt in the silence of her apartment. She couldn’t even bring herself to say “hello.”

The whirring cut off, there was a momentary pause, and suddenly Rey could hear Ben as clearly as if he were standing beside her, his lips brushing her ear. She wrapped her blanket tighter around her shoulders as gooseflesh mingled with the bristling hair on her forearms. 

“Uh, I don’t know,” he replied, his voice deep and soft and rumbling despite the stammer. “Honestly? It doesn’t fill me with joy, no.”

“Why?” 

Ben let out a short, humorless laugh that was almost the twin to the chuckle Rey had felt bubbling up inside of her an hour ago. “You sure you want to hear this?”

“Obviously, or I wouldn’t have called you out of the blue.”

Another laugh, this time laced with something so gentle that Rey finally felt herself blush.

“You’re welcome to call me any time, Rey, out of the blue or not. Besides,” Ben murmured, “I asked if I could talk to you again, didn’t I?” Rey’s blush grew so hot that she had to lift her blanket over her head and press her forehead to the cool wood of her desk. Her Omega, lying dormant in the rush of anger and disappointment from that morning, woke nearly panting. 

_Alpha is pleased with us. He could_ **_want_ ** _us._

_Nope,_ Rey thought frantically. _Nope, no he couldn’t._

_He_ **_could_ ** _,_ the voice whispered, cheering. _He could he could he cou-_

Ben’s voice, so warm that Rey could feel it like a touch, a hand stroking her hair, interrupted her inner battle before she could escalate it by doing something ridiculous. Like yelling “shut the hell up already!” at a voice _in her head_. That wouldn’t be awkward or anything. “My parents were both Alphas, and every member of my family has been going back generations.”

“Jesus.”

“Yep. I went to all-Alpha boarding schools after presentation when I was 12--”

“That’s ridiculously early.”

“It was.”

“And?”

A long silence answered Rey, and she could swear, as she huddled in the rickety old computer chair she and Finn had scored on the side of the road several years ago, her blanket slipping down the back of her neck, that she could almost hear him breathing. 

“I never wanted it,” Ben said, quiet this time, contemplative. And then, in a rush: “I never wanted the legacy of being an Alpha. I wanted...more. I wanted to see everything the world had to offer, I wanted to have a person pick me for _me_ , not because _pheromones_ told them I was a good match.”

The words were so familiar, so close to the wishes that pounded like thunder in Rey’s veins, that she felt like he’d personally pulled each of them out from between the ventricles of her own heart. 

Hadn’t she wanted...everything…too? Hadn’t she dreamed, as a sixteen year old newly presented Omega, of being born glandless and normal, with the world spread out before her like a buffet?

It was so strange, hearing her own hopes from the lips of an _Alpha_.

She pressed a hand to her chest, barely able to breathe as he continued.

“When I presented, my parents were supposed to be proud. And they were, for a few days. A week after my twelfth birthday, they sent me away to a boarding school. And in high school, when I had a shitty time controlling all the mood swings that came with presenting so damn early, they shuffled me off to my hippie Uncle’s commune for a few years to keep it all out of the spotlight until I graduated high school.”

Rey wondered what it would be like, to even have family who could shuffle you off. But then, hadn’t her own parents done the same? Left her alone in a hospital hallway to be found by a nurse, several hungry hours later? 

“I get along with my parents now,” Ben continued, his tone just casual enough that Rey could tell it was almost the truth. “But it took me a long time to really trust them again. And…I don’t think I’m answering your question, just spilling my family bullshit.”

“No,” Rey whispered, clutching her phone as if it were a lifeline. She didn’t know how to tell him that she felt the same way, didn’t have the words to properly communicate to him how alone she’d always felt until they started talking. “No, it’s okay. I asked you, and I don’t mind.”

“Still,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“What’s bothering you.”

Rey ran frustrated fingers through her still-damp hair. “I don’t think I know how to.”

And Ben, his voice so surprisingly soft when he was...mountainous, replied, “But do you want to?”

_Yes_ , Rey thought, trying to blink away a stream of frustrated tears. _But_ _I want more than that._

It took a long time for Rey to piece out why she’d called Ben, but he was silent and he was patient, letting her collect her thoughts and not commenting on the several times her voice hitched or cracked with barely suppressed sobs.

“I don’t even know if my primary care appointments will still be covered.”

“I just want to exist in _some_ space wi-without being an Omega. I’m so tired of being designated.”

“I’m…” Rey leaned forward, pressing her ribs against the desk’s edge until she felt a pinch, just to give her _something_ she could focus on that wasn’t abject misery. The long moments of quiet had begun to feel like she was talking to herself or speaking into some great void. It was easier this way, more words poured out of her in the last fifteen minutes than she’d spoken to Finn in twelve years of friendship. “I’m sick of being poor and sad. I’m sick…” her voice cracked, “of being alone.”

“But Rey,” Ben said, so suddenly that she nearly jumped. His voice was raspy now, and she could hear a faint clicking as if he were typing. Was he working? Was she interrupting? Ugh. “You’re not alone.”

Rey gave a massive sniffle, her fingers clutching the phone so tightly her knuckles turned pale. A sudden, painful longing gripped her about the chest. She didn’t know why she felt it, didn’t know exactly how to describe it, but it filled up the spaces sadness and worry had occupied moments before.

“Neither are you.”

  
  


**

Rey glanced at the clock on her microwave after she’d finally insisted on letting Ben go, wiping the drying remnants of her tears from her cheeks. 

11:15am. 

They’d talked for nearly two hours.

And somehow, in that stretch of time, Rey had felt more hopeful, more... _heard_ , than she had in years. She wanted to roll in the feeling, bask in it like a cat in a patch of sunlight, but the somewhat dilapidated wall that had once been her defenses still held her back. It was her constant companion, built brick by brick through abandonment, starvation, rejection, and sorrow. Behind it, a coltish little girl sat, knees tucked to her pounding heart, hidden in the pitch-blakc depths of a closet. Beside her, in every memory Rey ever had, an equally trembling boy sat, clutching her hand as fists hammered on the door. 

Could she? Could she let herself roll and laze in those tiny, hopeful beginnings of happiness? Rey rubbed her aching eyes, the beginnings of a tension headache. She wished she was some...well-adjusted adult. A grownup who could reach out to her doctor with full confidence despite whatever waited for her: rejection or opportunity. A grownup who could bridge the miles that sat between her and Ben as if they were a mere few feet. A grownup who could just... ask the man she sort of longed for, the man who made her feel like a smile was familiar, on a damn date already.

Sighing, Rey clambered up from her computer chair, rolling her shoulders as her legs began to come back to tingling life from the long sitting session.

She cursed, low and swift.

...Maybe she’d start with calling her doctor? 

**

She changed her clothes, turned up the heat to soothe her numb joints, fed her fish, made herself a cup of tea. 

And then, when she was scrubbed clean in fresh pajamas, her heart once again beating at a steady, semi-calm cadence, Rey sank into her desk chair, picked up her phone, and dialed Dr. Mothma’s Omegacare office.

_Why don’t you call your pcp?_ Ben had said, in that gentle, rumbling voice of his. _Just in case, just to see if you’re still covered and if you can get in._ She barely knew him, had talked to him only twice now, but she loved that voice already.

God. Rey stared down at her dry, still-trembling hands. She really did love his voice, didn’t she? She loved his taste in music, the dry jokes he sent, the silence of his listening.

When she was with her friends, no matter how loved they made her feel, how seen, there was still a separation. She still felt like she was somehow on the edge, a voyeur gazing into someone else’s life. But with Ben? Even when she was at her most nervous, she still felt at home.

For the first time in hours, Rey smiled.

Her phone rang for a long time before the automated system stuck her on hold, letting her know that there were _several other callers ahead_ but that the office _truly valued her time_. Rey snorted, running her now-warm fingers over her severely outdated Mac’s trackpad to wake the computer from hibernation.

Despite bleak hopelessness beating its wings against the jar of her ribcage, Rey _refused_ to think there wasn’t an alternative. After her talk with Ben, hope curled like a germinating seed inside of her. Surely there was something she could take instead of injections, some new form of treatment? 

“Please please please,” she chanted, balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder as she quickly typed _emergency suppressants no insurance coverage_ into her search bar.

The results made her stomach plummet against a soundtrack of cheerful elevator hold music.

_Far Right Lobbyists Win Battle for Designation Rights._

_Senator Leia Organa on New Efforts to Regain Omega-Rights Ground_

_“This Will Kill People,” Senator Organa Fires Back At New FDA Regulations_

Rey didn’t have a television and refused to keep up with the News app on her phone, so she’d missed the new FDA regulations targeting emergency blockers and suppressants, due to side effects discovered during several trials. 

She could only skim one article, which was topped with a picture of an irate Senator Organa pointing her finger into the distance behind the camera. It was an old photo, one Rey remembered seeing across social media after the senator had taken the floor in a fourteen hour filibuster to prevent the passing of a law targeting elective hormonal treatments for designated humans. 

Apparently the same suppressant brand and dose Rey herself took before every heat had killed six people in a recent experimental study. 

One study. Six people. Kidney and heart failure. 

No more emergency suppressants.

“Fu-” Rey muttered, just as the hold music ended with a sharp click and a tired voice filled her ears.

“OHSU Omegacare Office, this is Monica. How can I help.”

It was more of a statement than a question, but Rey felt the exhaustion in the voice down to her core. 

“Oh um hi,” she stammered, staring at that high resolution picture of Senator Organa. She wore muted burgundy lipstick, her matching suit jacket draped over her shoulders. Her wire-rimmed glasses were slightly tinted from the harsh fluorescent lights. Rey wondered how it had felt, speaking for fourteen hours with a camera shoved in her face. “I’m an existing patient. I received a letter from my insurance terminating my e-emergency suppressants and wanted to see if I could get in with um, Dr. Mothma to discuss another treatment maybe?”

“Ah okay,” Monica said, voice now swift and crisp. “Luckily Dr. Mothma isn’t seeing too far out right now. Let me check her availability. Could I put you on hold for a moment?”

“Sure.”

The cheerful elevator music had been replaced by 70s porn jazz. Rey balanced her elbow on the freshly-polished surface of her reclaimed desk, taking advantage of the moment to slurp down more tea. She refused to look at anymore articles.

How long had that letter been sitting in her mailbox? She’d _just_ had a dose of emergency suppressants, would she be expected to pay for them out of pocket now?

A phone call to Aetna to discuss coverage and options was just too daunting to think about. 

Rey jumped when the hold music ended again, almost spilling her tea. 

“Thank you for holding, are you still there?”

“Yeah um, yes I am.”

“Wonderful,” good old Monica said. “I have Dr. Mothma’s schedule pulled up right now. Do you have a preferred day or time for an appointment?”

“As soon as possible,” Rey said, gently setting her teacup down on its coaster. “I can use my PTO at work if needed.”

“Sounds good. It’s Thursday now, so how does Monday sound? 10:00am?”

Only three days of panicking ahead, and she even had the day off. She’d take it. “Perfect.”

“Great. Go ahead and tell me your name…”

Rey scribbled the time and date of the appointment onto a post it as she gave the secretary her information, confirming that _yes_ she still lived at the same (dump) address, and _yes_ unfortunately her insurance was still current. She stuck the little piece of pink paper to the matching blank square on her barely used calendar and sat back, pushing errant strands of damp hair off her forehead.

She felt sticky and tense as she ended the call with Dr. Mothma’s office, her calves aching from the run up the slippery apartment steps. Pushing her computer back against the wall, she lifted each leg onto the surface of the desk to stretch her tired muscles. An appointment would be comforting, maybe Dr. Mothma would have an alternative treatment in mind or could recommend a great horse tranquilizer, but…

Maybe. Maybe there was something.

She typed out a brief message to Ben after she navigated to Hulu and turned on Brooklyn 99, just for cheery background noise: _I did it. I have an appointment Monday. Thank you, Ben._

It only took him moments to respond: _Don’t thank me, Rey. I should thank you._

_Why?_

_You gave me a gift._

_What do you mean, what gift?_

_The gift of knowing you._

This time, the tears that kissed Rey’s cheeks were happy ones.


	10. fragrant sauce dripping out,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SO sorry for the delay!!!! But folks...next up is Ben's second interlude and after!??!??! THE MOMENT WE'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR. So keep with me!
> 
> Thank you all for commenting, for the kudos, for the support and kind words, and for sticking with this weird little story that barely has a plot. I hope everyone is safe and healthy in these trying times, and I heart you all!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Depressive episode, suicidal ideation. 
> 
> (if anything isn't tagged correctly, please let me know <3)
> 
> This chap is unbetaed, all mistakes are my own, including pacing lol :)

this hour it is not

your body I want

but your quiet company

\-- michael ondaatje,  _ speaking to you (from rock bottom) _

When Rey was small, six or so, she worked for a man named Unkar Plutt. 

Yes,  _ worked _ .

They had a peculiar arrangement, Rey and Plutt. She, scrawny and coltish, would crawl and shimmy into every nook or crevice the corpulent auto parts dealer couldn’t reach. And he would exchange anything useful she found for food. 

_ Everyone works around here, girl,  _ he’d said the second her social worker dropped her off, his clammy hand dropping like a lead weight from her shoulder, the easy smile he’d flashed vanishing as if it had never been there in the first place, never curved his stiff lips.  _ Get used to it. _

For the three years Rey lived with Plutt, that was how she ate, until her social worker came by for a surprise visit and found Rey under a half-crumpled Volvo on the front lawn, attempting to pry apart sections of its rusted undercarriage. She’d taken one look at nine year old Rey, a little taller but no less coltish, skin tanned and freckled and greasy, smears of black across her cheeks and her collarbone showing in stark relief under her thin tee shirt, and asked her to pack her bag immediately.

_ Three years _ . It was amazing how long something could stick with you, could melt and meld itself into the marrow of your bones. Now, fourteen years later, Rey still hoarded food in her closet out of fear that she would come home to find her cabinets empty, chips and crackers and even wrinkled little  _ apples _ from the fridge still locked up in Plutt’s safe. She still winced when she heard the deep, rumbling sound of a middle aged man’s laugh, or the slam of a car door outside. Heavy, booted footsteps still sent an electric shock of terror down her spine, even though she hadn’t heard Unkar’s hulking gait in so long that she could only be reacting to a ghost by now.

And worst of all...despite truly knowing that food and water were basic necessities every single human being or animal was entitled to, Rey still felt like she had to earn them. And not just food, but basic needs like  _ affection _ and understanding and fucking  _ toilet paper _ .

Forty five minutes after her last text message with Ben, the last beautiful comment he’d sent that had delivered itself like a punch to her gut, Rey found herself still in her desk chair, legs drawn up, ruminating.

Was this why she couldn’t quite bear to meet him yet? Because it was something she didn’t feel she deserved? 

How could he think she was a gift when nearly every single person in her life so far had treated her like she was merely an obligation? Every foster family, every school friend. Every teacher who had ignored the greasy hair she went to school with as a child, the weight she lost, the homework that came back wrinkled and covered in motor oil. Her own mother hadn’t been able to shoulder the burden that was Rey. She only ever had Finn, and she had Poe now too because of him.

If Rey were a gift, she would be one of those obligatory holiday gifts people return to stores after New Years. Something easily disposed of, forgotten about.

_ God _ .

She really was depressed. Too bad Omegas couldn’t even take fucking Prozac. If she could, would she have insurance to pay for it after the FDA cut?

There were occasions every couple of years like a particularly painful Mercury Retrograde or something, when Rey felt this way: when the ghosts of her past rose up inside her like a cacophony, when she couldn’t ignore the pounding drum of  _ useless useless useless useless _ that had followed her since she was six years old. 

(When she came back empty handed:  _ useless girl _ . When she forgot the time:  _ will you ever make yourself useful? _ Her life had always orbited around the concept of her own use and how others could benefit from it.)

It was always a culmination: a job lost, a utility turned off, a bill from Nelnet letting her know she was past due...again, a particularly bad Omega moment. Sometimes, even a rude customer could press her buttons hard enough to set it off. 

Usually she could tamp it down, saturate her sadness with music or a Ghibli film and escape what felt like an itch beneath her skin, an ache under her skull. But after the last time, when she’d finally admitted to Finn that she’d taken a two hour bath and contemplated drowning the entire time and what it would feel like to fall asleep and never wake up, he had insisted outright that she reach out to him when the feelings came again, no matter what the non-Omega, the idiot human voice inside of her, the voice that sounded eerily like Unkar Plutt whispered in the dark. 

_ You tell me, _ Finn said, and his eyes had been the brightest, the most earnest she’d ever seen.  _ No one should ever feel like that. You tell me. Promise me, Rey. Swear you’ll tell me. _

Sniffling, Rey reached across her old, furiously hissing laptop (one day the thing was going to overheat and blow up her apartment) for her phone. It would be what, the fifth time in as many days that she would be sending the same damn text?

Rey roughly swiped at her cheeks with the back of one cold, trembling palm.  _ God, I’m a mess. Who gets this fucked up over a letter from insurance? _

But Rey knew it wasn’t just the letter. It was the feeling that once again, a choice  had been taken from her.

**Rey:** Hey, do you have a sec

She wiped her eyes again, a fruitless effort really. She could hardly feel the tears anymore. Mere seconds later, her phone vibrated in her hand, joining her sniffles as the only sounds in the otherwise silent space.

**Finn:** For you light of my life? Always. ‘Sup?

**Rey:** So I got  a  this letter from Aetna. 

**Finn:** Hearing from insurance is never good. What’d it say? You owe 5 million?

Basically.

**Rey:** That would be better. Sooo000oooo0000 my emergency suppressants aren’t covered anymore. They’re not even making them due to new fucking FDA regulations. I might have had a tiny, totally minor mental breakdown wooooooooo  


It felt...good telling Finn, even though the urge to make a joke overrode the temptation to bare her soul. 

It had been easy to spew every single broken shard of her feelings to Ben Solo in the  _ moment _ , when emotion felt like a wave pulling her under, but Rey knew if she had let herself stew, she never would have said anything to him at all. 

**Finn:** Shit and also fuck (also only you would put a comma before a dab, jesus). Did you call Mothma yet?

**Rey:** I have an appointment Monday. Based on all the shitty news articles circulating, it doesn’t look good. 

**Finn:** I’ll see if I can find out anything about alternatives. Was it Republican passed? I’d look, but ya know...sneaking.

**Rey:** Yep, how’d you know? Maybe horse tranquilizers could work. You could prescribe me some on the side :D

**Finn:** You really overestimate my abilities. I'm a vet, rey, not a doctor.

**Rey:** Please????

**Finn:** No. 

**Rey:** :((((( help your poor retail worker friend, Finny. Come on, you’d be doing the lord’s work.

**Finn** : Are you still talking to that Alpha? :D

**Rey:** Dammit Finn.

She’d actually been considering horse tranquilizers. 

**Finn:** I need to know some good news in the midst of this shit stew. 

**Rey:** Fine. Yes, we talked today. He...thanked me. For some reason.

_ The gift of knowing you.  _

_ Me _ , Rey thought, staring down at the splintered screen of her phone, a sharp, sad little smile slanting across her mouth. Despite the wet blanket of disassociation already beginning to creep over her shoulders, the words still brought a tinge of joy as well as awe.  _ Me. _

**Finn:** Amazing!!! I am so proud of you, so proud :’) Thanked you for what, being the fantastic peanut that you are?

**Rey:** No, he said knowing me’s been a gift. It was so...nice? 

And because if anything, Rey was brittle:

**Rey:** Think he’ll ghost me soon? XD

**Finn:** Don’t do that to yourself babe. Don’t sell yourself short.

Rey sniffled miserably. All the walls, the self-deprecation, crumbled.

**Rey** : I can’t help it. Why did he say that, Finny? It’ll be so much harder now when he decides to stop talking to me.

**Finn:** He won’t. 

**Rey:** Sure Jan.

**Finn:** No, Rey. You need to listen to me. I know you’ve had a lot of utter fucking bastards in your past. Know that if I could, I’d kill them all for you, or at least help you bury the bodies like a good friend should. But you? You’re a gift. You ARE. Knowing you is a gift. Being your friend is a gift. 

**Finn:** And some people don’t leave. Some people stick around, because they care. Like Poe and me, we could never leave you. We love you, and you’re family. Maybe, if you can really let him, this Alpha could love you too. 

In the end, all Rey could do through a haze of fresh tears was send Finn a heart emoji. Such a simple, stupid little thing, but Finn’s instant reply of  _ I love you _ told her he knew her intention, what she couldn’t write. She didn’t have the mental power to tamp down all the love and sadness and searing affection she was choking on and knit them into words. 

It would be so easy to compartmentalize, to stuff the disappointment, the shame of her designation into their tiny shoeboxes in the back of her mind. She could stare into space for awhile and disassociate, maybe turn on Netflix, make comfort food, even order a damn $35 Portland pizza and distract herself for the rest of her day off. But Rey found herself crawling under her covers instead, her hair pasted to her face with salty tear residue and the lingering dampness from her run through the rain. 

She huddled there, knobby knees curled to her chest, sniffling into her pillows, her comforter dragged up over her head so all she could see was darkness, for a long time.

She’d spent so many years folding and tucking away her emotions, pushing away the tears or the anger. 

For once, she wanted to give in.

**

By the time morning arrived many hours later, Rey had done nothing but sleep, dry-sob, and occasionally drag herself to the kitchen for water or crackers. She’d ignored her texts and hadn’t turned on the lights or the television, huddling beneath her comforter like a lonely little lump. 

Sleep was a heavy thing, like drowning in cotton. Rey barely felt herself go under, but after a while opening her eyes was nearly impossible.

Depression had never been like this before, this all-encompassing need to be unconscious. That had been reserved for heats, for feelings of desire, of helplessness and vulnerability that Rey would do anything, even inject herself with tranquilizers, to avoid. Instead, depression was a constant, a voice in the back of her head, the general icy throes of apathy. The random crying fits at her desk, the need to eat anything put in front of her just to escape the yawning emptiness.

But this was new and this was different. Under the layers of exhaustion and bone-crunching sadness, Rey felt scared. Why did everything need to change? What would she do now, when her crutch was gone? Those three or so days of oblivion, of beautiful dreams and  _ sleep _ , sleep so sweet she could practically taste it like candy on her tongue, would never be hers again.

The thought kept slapping her into wakefulness throughout the night, kept tears at a constant trickle down her cheeks, into her ears and hair. Every time she sank under the weight of unconsciousness, she found herself jerking out of it minutes or hours later, staring into the darkness and wondering what the  _ fuck _ she was going to do.

Because those feelings of desire and vulnerability meant rejection. Rejection meant abandonment. And Rey knew, despite the years of conditioning she’d endured, that she would not survive being abandoned...again. 

She had never quite cursed being an Omega this much before. 

As the sky outside slid from clouded darkness and hesitant stars to filtered morning light, Rey’s eyes flickered open. For the past unknowable length of time, she had slept without dreaming, and now she moved from unconsciousness to wakefulness in a single moment. She had forgotten to shut her curtains the night before and the watery Portland sunlight poured, liquid and enthusiastic, across the hardwood and her bedspread, striking her directly between the eyes. Groaning, Rey slapped a warm hand across her face, blocking out the offending sun.

Her head felt like a shriveled fruit, tight and hot and aching. She rubbed her temples as she lay there, soaked with sweat and the salty remnants of her tears, her legs tangled in her comforter. 

Beneath her pillow, right under her forearm, her phone vibrated. 

_ Shit _ , Rey thought, jackknifing herself into a sitting position so fast her neck popped. She’d ignored that same vibrating all night, even when it was accompanied by the trilling of her ringtone. Finn probably thought she’d offed herself in the shower.

Fumbling, Rey finally produced her phone from  _ inside her pillowcase _ and sighed at the tiny red block of battery screaming 12%. She had seven unread text messages and three calls. One voicemail.

_ Hmm _ , Rey thought, nodding to herself as she plugged in her phone and opened the first message from Finn.  _ Better than expected. _

**Finn:** Hey babe, no news on any alternate meds yet. How you holding up?

Then, time stamped an hour later:

**Finn:** Rey?

**Finn:** REY.

**Finn:** R E Y

Rey winced, even though it had been hours since he’d sent that. She could  _ hear _ it. Ignoring the rest of the messages, she quickly typed out an affirmation that YES she was okay and YES she’d had a mental breakdown (haha hee hee lol rofl) and no, she didn’t need anyone coming over.

She then deleted Poe’s 3 minute long voicemail. 

And turned her attention to the three messages from...Ben. God. Rey’s heart felt wrung out and strangled as she skimmed them.

**Ben:** How’s your day so far?

**Ben:** Hmm, not raining for once. Think the apocalypse is nigh?

And then, because he didn’t seem the type to pry or spam, several hours later:

**Ben:** Hi Rey, I made something for you. You don’t have to listen, it's totally okay if you hate it, but music always helped me through shitty times. I thought it might help you. Text me when you can, if you still want to. I’ll be here.

Rey’s eyes instantly filled with tears, even though it seemed she had completely exhausted her tear ducts last night. Her empty stomach clenched, and that strange little blush she always felt curling up her neck whenever Ben messaged her began its slow ascent. The text was accompanied by a Spotify link, and instead of clicking it, Rey opened her own Spotify app and easily found Ben’s profile, as they had followed each other days ago.

And then, as she skimmed the title of the mixtape he’d made her, twelve songs he’d taken the time to select for her, to show he was thinking about her, she rested her chin on her knees and smiled.

**

[ ](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Xcd1Mtd7w58tP6r3yTLnk?si=fYHQ1R33TxSsvHi1a_xIUQ)

It had taken over twenty minutes for Rey to find her earbuds. She could have just played the mix on her phone at top volume, but she’d gotten the speaker wet last year and it hissed and popped whenever she played music. Finally, she found them lurking in the pocket of a pair of athletic leggings, tucked halfway under her mattress. 

Crying out in triumph in her raspy morning voice, Rey held them aloft and then set about untangling them, her teeth clamped tight to her lower lip. She wandered about the apartment this way for several minutes, pausing only to start the kettle for some oatmeal, take a few Advil, and to pick up a bit of the cracker wrappers she’d scattered the night before. She left the rest of the mess...the clothing, the dust, the crumpled, bedraggled blankets. 

Rey rarely drank, but she felt hungover and she supposed she was, all tight and stiff and wrung out like a freshly rinsed towel. Nothing like a...crying hangover? Even the roots of her hair ached, although the heat in her cheeks and neck dissipated after she chugged several cups of water, her earbuds dangling half-untangled from her fingers.

Finally, after several minutes of muttered cursing and a brief interruption so she could shovel oatmeal into her mouth like a hippo at a trough, she was pressing her earbuds into her ears with shaking fingers.

_ For Rey _ , the mixtape was titled.  _ It’ll get better. _

Ignoring her dirty dishes, her messy apartment, the sinking feeling in her gut, Rey pressed play, and sank back down on her mattress.

**

The following Monday found Rey on the green line MAX trundling toward OHSU. She had buried herself in a thick hoodie and leggings and sat, her dark hood pulled up over her head, in an outside seat, curled up with her hands in her pockets. 

The train was alive with the sounds of people ignoring one another, lost in their own worlds. The shuffling of feet, muffled music playing from earbuds, the light rattle and creak of the tracks, a lone older man in the corner seat, murmuring as he dozed against the window. It was a loud, huffing silence. A welcome one, considering any public outing usually came with a barrage of scents and strange feelings.

Being on suppressants helped, tamped down the smells of linoleum and urine, the overwhelming stink of Beta sweat mixed with the occasional Omega or Alpha. Omegas smelled the best, all floral and warm and comforting, but Alphas sometimes straight up smelled like shit, like sour rotten sweat. Suppressants were a gift in a modern age, with overpopulation and crowding.

Rey slipped her own earbuds in, resorting, as she had for the last few days, to the mixtape Ben had sent her instead of her usual self help Omega podcasts. She had cried to it this weekend, smiled to it, cooked to it, showered to it. She still didn’t know exactly how she felt about it, especially his choice of  _ known love songs  _ like Everlong (he was probably just trying to be nice), but she knew it made her heart feel like it was on fire.

For the first time in her short life, she felt something like hope curling around her insides. Did Ben care about her? Did he just want to send the songs he found most comforting, or did each one hold its own meaning, a message sent from him to her?

She remembered every song they’d sent each other, every  _ good morning _ , the broad expanse of his beautiful freckled back the first night she’d seen him through the window. The way he’d looked at her, across rain-soaked cobblestones, as if he could devour her but wanted to savor her instead.

The way he’d  _ smelled _ , too. Like everything she’d ever longed for.

Were these songs letters? Did they hold messages for her to decipher? 

Could he maybe,  _ maybe _ , feel an inkling of something for her, something more than friendship?

Rey took a deep, settling breath, clutching her phone to her chest as the tinkling strains of  _ Bridge Over Troubled Water _ tickled her ears. No, surely not. Right? It was just something nice.

It had to be.

_ Thank you _ , she’d told him, after her first listen.  _ I’m sorry I didn’t reply for awhile, I was going through some things. This mix made it so much better :) _

_ I’m glad :) It’s alright, you have a life, I don’t expect you to immediately reply to me. I mean, I always enjoy talking to you, I just don’t want you to feel pressured. _

Pressured?  _ Ben _ , she wanted to write then, as she frowned down at the little blue bubble of his text message,  _ you are the highlight of every single depressing day of my miserable goddamn life. I don’t care if you’re an Alpha, I crave you like I crave silence, like I miss my own mother. If I had any idea how to be emotionally vulnerable in a world that wants to toss me down a garbage chute, I’d tell you. But I’m scared. You get that right? Being scared? _

But instead, she replied:  _ I never feel pressured, I want to talk. _ Her fingers couldn’t type anything else. She couldn’t elaborate, couldn’t shorten her sentence or add a stupid emoji to make it a joke. God, texting him sometimes felt like her heart was playing skip rope, like she was battling herself, her every instinct.

It didn’t help that every time she held herself back from typing anything remotely romantic, her ridiculous Omega nearly  _ keened _ with displeasure. 

Rey leaned her head against her seat’s headrest, curling one leg over the other as the train stopped to let a few more people on at NW 5th & Couch, about nine stops away from her destination. Just a bit longer...and then a forty minute walk to the OHSU Omegacare Office in the rain. Wonderful. 

Ben had messaged her that morning around 6, and for once she’d been up to answer him. He was working now, she knew, but...would it hurt if she sent something? Really quick, just a hello?

_ God, I’m an idiot. _

Her Omega hindbrain heartily disagreed.  _ Alpha, we need him. Tell him. Tell! _

_ Shut it you bloody great reptile. _

Rey glared down at her hands as she opened their messages, quickly typing before she could think twice about it and delete the words. She rarely initiated their discussions, outside of the one moment of weakness she’d had, calling him out of the blue. 

**Rey:** How’s work?

To her surprise, he replied in seconds. His reliability always shocked her. Even Finn had his days of radio silence, but Ben? Never.

**Ben:** About as pleasurable as having a toenail removed without anesthesia. How are you?

Rey snorted, drawing the attention of an oddly familiar young woman sitting across from her, two rows ahead. Her hair and features were obscured by a navy blue knit cap and a gray jacket hood, but she still smelled familiar, a mix of tangy sweat, of cotton with hints of springtime flowers...and...something thicker, muskier. Rey flashed her a small, uncomfortable smile as the other woman peeked over her shoulder to find the source of the noise, then turned back to her phone. Maybe she was seeing an Omega or had slept with one recently?

Because she smelled like a building  _ heat _ , and no Omega would be outside when their hormones were compounding like that. Not to mention it was illegal. 

Shrugging to herself, Rey skipped down the playlist to Florence Welch and settled in, tapping out a quick reply to Ben. It wasn’t her business, but she hoped whomever they were didn’t get caught. Incompetent in nearly every other way, Portland police had an odd talent for telling when you needed to leave your house before a heat.

**Rey** : Oh lovely, seems like it’s going well then XD I’m a zombie. It’s 7am and I’m conscious against my will.

**Ben:** That is pretty rare for you. Heading to your appointment? Yeah, it’s great. Having a little disagreement over security procedures with my boss. Who happens to be my Uncle. Painfully awkward, to say the least.

**Rey:** You work with your uncle? Must be nice to have family around. Yep, almost there. 

**Ben:** You’d think. I work with my entire family, and they are all pains in the ass. My mom and uncle run the company together, and they’re hoping I’ll take over when he finally kicks the bucket. He’ll probably outlive me out of spite, but I guess it’s nice. I spent a long time without them, so I can handle their antics better now, or at least with less...rage? Are you taking the Max?

_ I like you _ , Rey thought, gazing down at her cracked phone screen. The fond smile on her face bordered on silly, and if she’d caught a glimpse of it in the train window, she would have flushed with pure embarrassment.  _ I like the way you talk with me, I like you. God, I like your taste in music and the way your voice rumbles inside of me like a fucking purr when I hear you speak over the phone. God. I like you. _

It was like a second heartbeat inside her:  _ I like you, I like you, I like you _ .  _ We haven’t even met, but I  _ **_fucking_ ** _ like you. _

_ An Alpha. _ She liked a damn Alpha, who would have thought? And even worse...she didn’t care at all.

(She refused to acknowledge her hindbrain pricking its ears at the confession, pleased.)

**Rey:** Ha, see, I’d kill to have family throwing me into various rages, even though that sounds like it can get super awkward. It’s good that you’ve reunited with them. Is it too nosy of me to ask how long you were without family? If so, I totally understand, boundaries and all :) Yeah, I’m on the Max. Nice and quiet this time of day.

Rey tucked her head back against the frosted train window, still grinning down at the little device in her hand. Funny how she could feel so light, so happy talking with an Alpha. An Alpha who, despite the many personality quirks and history they had in common, their shared disdain for designation, still held a position of authority in their culture. An Alpha with power and privilege, a great job, money, a beautiful apartment she’d spent days staring into before he’d moved in, bored at her menial customer service gig.

She should hate him. His designation alone should make her hate him.

She really should.

Shouldn’t she?

**

It had been several months since Rey last saw Dr. Mothma, but the Omega physician hadn’t changed.

Still tall and willowy, her short-capped auburn hair curling around her ears, she was just as unflappable, as  _ peaceful _ as she had been during their initial appointment two years ago.

She sat across from Rey in the cold little examination room, ankles crossed, a rolling desk holding a battered Lenovo laptop resting between them. Her smile was a soft and placid thing, her pale graceful hands resting lightly in her lap.

Rey on the other hand, was folded as tightly as possible into one of the cracked gray plastic chairs, directly below a poster of a long-haired figure walking into a burnt umber sunset proclaiming  **LOVE YOUR DESIGNATION! BE WHO YOU WERE BORN TO BE!** , the very picture of trembling anxiety. OHSU usually made her wait, alone in a cement-blocked room with no reception to occupy her, but there was something particular about hospitals, about doctors’ offices and grainy fluorescent lighting, that made her nerves prick up, her fingers quiver. 

Maybe it was the distant memory of another cold plastic chair, another room thrown into relief by aggressive lighting. Another concerned nurse’s face hovering above hers, their long ago voice asking  _ honey, where’s your mommy? Have you been here long? _

Or perhaps it was the knowledge that she wasn’t certain whether or not this would be covered by insurance, that she didn’t know if she even  _ had _ options going forward. Either way, Rey found herself tangling her fingers together, biting her lip, tapping one curled foot against the metal legs of the chair, her stomach in knots. 

She couldn’t quite scent Dr. Mothma, the other woman was probably on the best suppressants her OHSU salary could afford, but Rey could catch bits of it if she focused hard enough, snatches of rosemary and chamomile. She took a deep breath of stagnant clinic air and scent, reminded of bedtime tea blends, knowing she was projecting a sour bouquet of nerves and apprehension. 

“Rey,” Dr. Mothma said, her tranquil voice cutting through Rey’s anxiety like a knife. She opened the laptop’s lid, breaking eye contact. Rey felt the absence of her gaze like a physical sensation. “How are you? It’s always good to see you.”

_ How am I? _ Rey wondered, staring down at the speckled white linoleum, her knuckles aching from continual twisting.  _ HA.  _

“Um.”

“That bad?” Dr. Mothma’s mouth quirked, and Rey’s stomach slowly began to unravel itself. 

“Is it that obvious?”

“You’re heavily suppressed as we both know, but if I couldn’t tell already by your scent, your body language alone would be screaming it.” Long fingers poised over the laptop’s keyboard. Any embarrassment Rey might have felt about the projection withered away at the sight of her kind gray eyes. “Start when you’re ready.”

Rey took her time. She fiddled with a spot of dirt on her leggings, crossed and re crossed her ankles, cracked every single knuckle on both hands, desperately avoiding eye contact. How could she tell a medical professional she preferred being unconscious to going through a heat? 

Finally, she huffed a heavy breath through her nostrils, wrapping her arms around her midriff and staring resolutely at the speckled linoleum floor.

“I...I’ve been on emergency suppressant injections since my first heat--”

Dr. Mothma cut in, rattling Rey’s already flickering pulse-- “you presented at thirteen, correct?”

“Yes,” Rey continued, staring so hard at the floor that the corners of her eyes began to well with a film of tears. Dr. Mothma clacked softly at the laptop keys, providing a strange background symphony to Rey’s frustration and shame. “I haven’t really had one um. By myself? As an adult? Um. I received a letter from my insurance this week saying they were no longer covering any emergency suppressants, and I wanted to see if any other options are out there to uh...control heats.”

A long silence greeted Rey’s stammered confession, a silence broken only by the rattling whir of an old air conditioner far above their heads (it was  _ February _ , why?), and then Mothma began typing again.

“Well Rey,” she started, slow and methodical as always. Rey watched her take her thin bottom lip between her teeth, her brows knitting. “The medical community’s been questioning the effectiveness of emergency suppressants for years. When you told me it was a main source of treatment for your heats, it surprised me.”

Rey blinked, feeling the quick rejection like a blow. She knew what was coming. There wouldn’t be any hope then, any way to keep running from what lay inside her, what sat at the base of her neck and the apex of her thighs, the indents of her wrists. 

_ No. _

Maybe Finn could find animal tranquilizers-

_ Maybe I could take a flying leap off the Hawthorne bridge. _

_ No, _ a tiny, tinny voice at the very back of her mind, nestled under the caterwaul of her anxiety, the insistent purr of her Omega, murmured.  _ No. You can’t swim. There would be no coming back. _

“Spending four days in and out of consciousness isn’t healthy, Rey,” she tried to gentle the news, the words Rey herself knew, but they still felt like prickles, like stings.  _ Is there something wrong with me? I don’t want to be this anymore. I don’t want it. Please take it away. _ “It can cause dehydration, nausea, constipation, and studies have shown an increased risk of cardiac effects. It-”

“But,” Rey helplessly interjected, trying to damp down on the anxious urge to cry, “I haven’t had a full heat since my first. I can’t- I can’t function during heats, days of being stuck in the house, not working. I can’t...be a victim with an Alpha. I can’t let someone else control my body that way. I...Isn’t there something else that can be done to at least prevent them?”

Two pairs of eyes, one haze, framed with tiny tears like pearls, helpless in their fear, the other cool and grey and seemingly unaffected met over the rim of the hospital laptop. Rey watched, quiet and thrumming, as Mothma’s eyes gentled, her mouth quirking in what she could only describe as a pitying smile.

An Omega who wants to be something else. What a contradiction.

There isn’t anything else she  _ can _ be.

“We can up your dose of suppressants,” Mothma replied with the air of someone trying to calm a wild animal. “But it wouldn’t be wise at your weight and age. It may be beneficial to switch name brands, maybe try one in combination with a contraceptive that could keep your cycles more controlled. But Rey, short of designation stripping or removal of your ovaries, there isn’t much we can do to take away your heats. We can make it easier for you, more routine, maybe more seldom as you’d prefer, but there is no healthy way to sleep through your cycle. It does have a biological purpose, no matter how inconvenient it may be during the modern age.”

Rey stared down at her feet in their dinged up once-red, now bordering on maroon Chuck Taylors. She tuned out the rest of Mothma’s spiel...concentrating instead on the buzzing in her head, the satisfied sigh of her hindbrain.  _ It must be nice _ , she thought,  _ after all these years of being a whisper in the back of my brain, to finally be let free. _

She would have heats every three months, then. She would have to sign more papers at work, have to pick up extra shifts for the Paid Heat Time, which didn’t come packaged with her sick leave as an hourly employee. She’d have to waste money on more sex toys, buy more damn sheets, close up the gaps between her doors and windows and the walls of her apartment so no one could scent her. 

Rey knew what happened when Alphas smelled Omegas in heat. She’d seen it, through clenched fingers, between the slats of a broken closet door.

She would have to make sure what happened then, years and years ago, a memory that sometimes still woke her screaming in the night, her voice like a clawing thing, wouldn’t be repeated. Wouldn’t happen to  _ her _ .

Rey finished her appointment in a strange haze of disassociation, feeling swathed in cotton and the harsh tang of rejection. She ran her credit card for the co-pay, taking the fstaped papers the receptionist slid across the painfully beige countertop. She didn’t bother saying goodbye to Dr. Mothma, who was now officially dead to her.  _ Biological purpose _ . What a bunch of horseshit.

“Looks like Dr. Mothma put a referral in for you as well,” the receptionist said, smiling over her computer screen.  _ Mindy _ , her name tag read. Her monitor was covered in Santa Claus post its and cheery little elf stickers.

“A referral?” What did she do now, Rey wondered.

“Mm hmm, for designation therapy services.”

“But-” Of course. Any Omega not wanting to go into heat was in need of therapy. Tamping down the rise of bitterness, Rey glanced guiltily over her shoulder at the near-empty waiting room. “My insurance.”

Mindy waved a pale, perfectly manicured hand, as if it were no big deal. “It says here that your insurance accepts designation therapy as long as you have a referral. You will need to contact them for copay amounts or coinsurance information, but would you still like Dr. Tano’s card? Or do you want to schedule now? She’s actually two doors down from us!”   
  
Kind of Dr. Mothma to  _ tell _ her she was sending Rey to the Omega shrink. 

Or maybe she had told her, during the long minutes she talked and Rey drifted. 

Flushing a bit with embarrassment and shame, Rey shrugged. “I’ll take her card, I don’t know my availability right now.”

“Sounds good. Well, you have a nice day!”

Rey inched toward the door, tucking her crumpled paperwork into her bag. She kept the business card clenched between thumb and forefinger, peering at it as she hurried out of the waiting room. 

The card stock was supple, luxurious, and textured. In capped letters were the words  _ Ahsoka Tano _ ,  _ LCSW _ in precise navy print, centered perfectly. Below the name, a phone number was engraved, and the words: Omega Specialty. 

So she specialized in messes, just like her. Rey snorted, swinging open the last glass door of the hospital’s massive complex before the world appeared again, soaked with rain and smelling off wet soil and spring growth. Rey’s chucks made squelching sounds as she stomped across the sidewalk, tucking her ear buds in, and with a twinge, avoiding Ben’s playlist. 

Something, some tiny hopeless voice, asked her if he had ever been referred to a shrink specializing in hopeless designated cases.

_ Or is it just you?Are you just broken? _

_ Fuck you _ , Rey thought, splashing through a puddle so forcefully, rain water soaked her socks.  _ Maybe I’ll ask him. _


End file.
